It has been a little while since we did our last DPU content at STH. Later this week, Patrick is going to be doing a LinkedIn live webinar on the topic along with folks from Achronix and the Dell’Oro group. This is a bit different for STH, so we thought we would do a quick post.
Talking DPUs this week with Achronix
DPUs are at a really interesting crossroads. On one hand, they are immensely popular in hyper-scale data centers. On the other hand, companies like Fungible were acquired at a low cost by Microsoft. Intel has yet to move its Intel E2000 / Mount Evans DPU IPU beyond Google in an appreciable way. AMD Pensando is out and is mostly focused on the networking side at the moment, with an integration even with VMware. NVIDIA BlueField-3 cards are much better than BlueField-2, but they are in short supply given the demand for NVIDIA’s AI servers and how NVIDIA is pushing those with its GPUs. Marvell has the Octeon 10 DPU in card form now.
There are a few big developments, but taking a step back, perhaps the biggest development is that DPUs have yet to really bring the AWS Nitro-level capabilities to most servers, even in 2024. When we did our first hands-on DPU piece in 2021 (A Quick Look at Logging Into a Mellanox NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU) we expected by 2024 that it would usher in a paradigm shift for NICs. Instead, AI has gotten a lot of investment dollars over the past two years.
It felt like time to discuss DPUs again, so Patrick is doing a webinar this week.
Final Words
We have no idea how this will go. Patrick is doing this more as a learning the process of doing a LinkedIn Live webinar. If you want to check it out, find the registration link here. The webinar is Thursday March 28, 2024 at 8AM Pacific.
Holy crap, what is up with the explosion of adverts on this site?
I may have a meeting conflict, but if I don’t I’ll join.
mashie – they’ve always promoted his speaking events?
I’m referring to the website itself, it used to be two adverts per article and it seems to be back to that once again. When I posted the above it was eight, one which was shown seven times.