Stefan Mileschin

SmartNICS help data centres

Chipzilla is pushing its idea of “infrastructure processing units” (IPUs) into its data centre infrastructure.

For those who came in late, IPUs are better known as “SmartNICs” or “data processing units” (DPUs) - they are network cards with enough processing power and storage to relieve a server’s CPU of boring background work.

Cloudy outfits like SmartNICs because they make money renting out CPU cores to their clients, shifting necessary workloads like chatting to storage devices or running a firewall onto a DPU/IPU/SmartNIC means clouds have more cores they can rent out.

DPUs/IPUs/SmartNICs are isolated from servers themselves, so the big clouds use the devices to run their cloud separated from the data and applications running on their servers.

Intel has pledged it would soon offer more IPUs based on its FPGA tech, custom ASICs, and the Xeon D and improve the software that allows customers to build leading-edge cloud orchestration software that eases users’ path to software-defined networks and virtual storage.

Intel wants to flog all this to cloud customers and prop up their interest in Xeons, or at least keep Intel inside any ARM servers they deploy.

https://fudzilla.com/news/53058-intel-brings-us-the-ipu