Xilinx claims Alveo U25 is first SmartNIC option on a single device
The SmartNIC market, using a network interface card or network adapter, to offload processing task from the system CPU, is forecast to exceed a value of $600million and comprise 23 per cent of the worldwide Ethernet adapter market by 2024, according to Baron Fung, research director at Dell’Oro Group.
Xilinx believes it offers the industry’s first SmartNic platform delivering convergence of network, storage and compute acceleration functions on a single device, the Alveo U25 SmartNIC, It is designed to bring the greater efficiency and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of SmartNICs to cloud service providers, telecomms companies and private cloud data centre operators to meet increasing networking demands and rising costs, said Xilinx.
Cloud service providers are deploying more SmartNICs to free up CPU cores for business applications, optimising server utilisation, continued Fung. Telecomms service providers are also looking to integrate SmartNICs from the core to the edge of the network for applications such as network function virtualisation (NFV) and artificial intelligent (AI) inferencing.
The Alveo U25 is an FPGA-based SmartNIC that combines an optimised SmartNIC platform with a powerful FPGA-based engine that supports full programmability and turnkey accelerated applications. It addresses the industry’s most challenging demands and workloads such as software defined networking (SDN), virtual switching, NFV, non-volatile memory express over fabric (NVMe-oF), electronic trading, AI inference, video transcoding and data analytics.
Powered by Xilinx’s FPGA technology, the Alveo U25 SmartNIC provides higher throughput and a far more adaptable engine than SoC-based NICs, says the company and allows cloud architects to accelerate a range of functions and applications quickly. The platform enables ‘bump-in-the-wire’ network, storage, and compute offload and acceleration for efficiency to reduce the CPU burden and reclaim resources to run more applications. Embedded Arm processors provide critical control plane processing to support emerging bare metal server use cases. The baseline NIC delivers high throughput, small packet performance and low-latency, says Xilinx. Standard NIC functionality and drivers, including Onload application acceleration software, can reduce latency up to 80 per cent and improve transmission control protocol (TCP)-based server application efficiency by up to 400 per cent in cloud-based applications, claims the company.
The Alveo U25 SmartNIC is currently sampling with early access customers. General availability is expected in Q3 2020.
