I remember back in the 90's we had network processors and Database processors as well in some of your servers and even a dedicated token ring processor!
Wow that was really densely packed with information and acronyms. My take away a DPU is a computer within a computer that can present remote assets as "native / local" to the DPU's host machine. If that wasn't it I guess I'll have to watch again.
I agree. It's a computer inside another computer to compute all the 'software defined ' that was supposed to run at the host computer, but as that trick didn't worked out because it is complicated and slowed down the host, so let's implement in a separate hardware.
It’s very cool these can remove the x86 completely from the solution. For data center x86 is probably the wrong solution for a lot of the actual problem space. This allows them to break away from the 1980s vintage x86 architecture cruft and engineer them specifically towards a network solution.
Firmware nightmare. I can already feel the pain that all those poor souls will have to suffer in the future dealing with all that unavoidable shitstorm of bugs.
running Vmware in your NIC... do you dare to upgrade to a major release you servers in another continent (while pandemic)? the ultimate IT challenge :D
ua-cam.com/video/aiCCUFXxVEA/v-deo.html post copy migration if you have a NIC specific error and the instance reaches the threshold post copy migration and pre copy migration avoid firmware bugs. Again if you utilize the latest Qemu as a hypervisor and docker as a container deployer your NIC specific issue will be non issue. VMware although the industry standard is quickly losing ground to alternatives like the highly revision Qemu now able to launch in seconds not minutes and now able to host low latency applications through software accelerated hardware emulation. With so many different endpoint operating systems and platforms and build versions it's all about staying ahead of the curve
Absolutely true, and only a small segment of these "DPU" devices will have well-developed firmware with good long term support. Most will be cases where main chipset producer puts out rushed "example" firmware, and then the integrators do a simple repackaging of that. And a short time later it will be abandonware. I have a tiny amount of insight into a large cloud provider, and they end up bringing ALL of the firmware in-house (and I mean ALL) so they can adequately support it. The large cloud providers end up with more insight into how the hardware performs than any of the actual hardware manufacturers are ever able to gather.
DPUs are a bit different. They can be located in the server on a PCIe card instead of as edge devices. They can be at the edge as well, but adoption is in the hyper scale data center first, then expanding elsewhere
Excellent video. Thank you for a clear explanation of what a DPU's function. It makes a lot of sense. It allows the host server CPUs to focus on running the OS and applications while the DPUs provide all the underlying server fabric services required by the CPUs such as storage, networking etc. in a very modular (or virtualized), scalable, and resilient architecture.
adds a new attack surface, including non secure boot, closed source firmware blobs, reliablility issues, especially when combined with encryption, virtual networking, deep packet inspection, ai supervised data filtering.
Very good and interesting video! However, you got me lost when you started talking about baremetal provisioning. Can you create a separate video WITH DIAGRAMS PLEASE explaining everything you said about baremetal provisioning?
Thank you for video (and accompanying article) 👍 Look fwd to finding out more about DPU H/W integration with terraform, ansible, cloud init, kickstart, chef Kind regards, neighbours and friends.
Great presentation! I needed that level of explaination. QUESTION: Is there a DPU for the little guy that has a few servers, or simply a guy that wants to learn hot to program these DPUs. Great expertise comes from practice, if you knwo what I mean. I sense that the demand for competent software engineers in DPUs will skyrocket ...if not already. It would be nice to see a Linux based OS for these.
There's not really anything new in computing - ideas come back and are reimplemented in new niches. This is similar to I/O channel processors from the 1970s.
Is it a “Programable Data Processor” unit? Maybe PDP for short? It’s a computer in your computer. Not a new idea, IO processors were common on mainframes.
Yo dawg, I heard you like hypervisors. I see this as taking a small bit of load off the vmkernel. Seems geared towards a MUCH bigger datacenter than what most of us will be touching for years. Still very interesting though.
That is the case at 10GbE speeds. As we get to 100GbE speeds, and with high-end storage/ accelerators, there are different pressures on the kernel. PCIe Gen4 (and later Gen5 in 2021/2022) will make it more difficult for CPUs and memory to keep up with the type of traffic the storage and network can generate.
So if I understand correctly this are super high performance NIC's designed to work with distributed network attached storage and graphics and present those devices to the host system as if they were local devices?
I think there are going to be quite a few VMware professionals who will buy one of these DPU NICs to get ahead on implementing Project Monterey. When it hits GA being able to show a lab demo setup/ experience is going to be a differentiator for employers and clients. Plus, seeing the demo of ESXi running on a Bluefield-2 NIC is crazy cool.
Given the data speeds we're talking that make these worthwhile, it's likely homelabs won't require these for a long time, unless you run services for people in your homelab or play with it because work. Of course, that's never stopped anyone, so yeah we'll see them in homelabs when hardware refreshes come through.
If these became mature, it would be easy to turn them inside out, so the motherboard has a DPU in the middle and a big PCIe 5 CXL root thing, then you slot in modules of CPUs, GPUs, Memory, Storage as needed, with all resources connecting over a pcie 5 network.
Quite interested to learn about those nitro cards AWS developed, any links to talks on them? (Preferably at level a tech enthusiast rather than Sysop could understand)
Yea :-/ This is something I realized that we had in our VMworld coverage but at 7AM this morning thought "hey maybe not everyone knows what a DPU is... maybe I should do a video..." Need to work on that for the next one but this is actually the shortest time to go from zero to video + companion piece we have had. Just need to get the workflow down a bit better.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo It's not an issue for me, I just wanted to point it out in case you want to fix the video and hadn't noticed it. Sometimes after you watch something so many times, you just can't see anything wrong anymore :)
Depends on how small. You can put them in servers so long as they can cool the cards. For a bigger lab, we have something we will be showing as part of an upcoming series testing these, but that is a 5U chassis.
... very much a noob here but couldn't a dpu be used to agragate a program exicutable that traditionally would run in a single core on multiple cores and possibly a second dpu to reconsolidate that that data making the program run more quickly and efficiently....dpu to dpu communication to understand what should be done and what should be expected... Thus taking a task traditionally exicuted as one thread and at least computationaly speeding it up... Sounds doable and given latency of data vs single thread proformance may be viable? Just thinking of the cores as servers and the dpu's as hypervisor's on a macro scale. Given that the components can't be miniaturized to fit onto a single chip solution yet. I can only see this being viable in the server space but if possible could lead to things like gameing servers running faster than the best desktop counterparts.
Some of the first applications for this are creating composable infrastructure so you can pull in storage and accelerators and make a local server think remote resources are local. In theory you could aggregate more than that but for single thread execution it is hard because hitting network is orders of magnitude higher latency than staying on chip/ package.
We have a DPU, her name is Marge, she's got a 104 bit bus, and a double data rate pipeline at about 2.6Hz She's about 58 years old and thinking about retiring
Sounds like Steam Processing, it's pretty common in finance and database programming. A hardware-accelerated version makes sense, but it will vary wildly on the data format and what you are doing with it. On Windows/ x86 context switches and exceptions are very heavy and any performance targets will quickly go out of the window, so I can see the appeal of MIPS here.🤔 Divide bandwidth by cache/ process(s) and that's how much time you have to analyse the data, it's like an extreme version of hot potato. Sure you can buffer the data, but it quickly reaches a point where it isn't live, and Goodluck writing it to disk or replaying it... Actually after thinking about it. These would be great at sorting/ filtering data before routing it to other systems where the load could be greatly reduced. They aren't actually that dissimilar to firewalls, it's just the use case that differs. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
in a couple of years our devices will be a small arm CPU with a huge DPU that interfaces with all the hardware that we want (Big CPUs, GPUs, RAM, Disks). Be prepared to pay to have more ram and just "download" it to your device.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo sure, but it would be interesting to quantify the impact of nvme over ethernet compared to direct attached nvme over virtio. I always anticipate some kind of overhead on the cloud, i wonder how much this contributes.
Well, the math coprocessor of the 386-era would actually be the 80387 :) But you would pick the Weitek 1167 - a non-Intel math coprocessor to the 80386, that was rare as a unicorn and would cost you a kidney and your firstborn along with all your cash back in the day
Wouldn't allowing the customer to run a bare metal server pose a hardware security risk? I.e. if the main x86 has internal configurations (e.g. via BIOS calls or BIOS security flaws) that can result in system bricking, or the ability to update the BIOS flash via the PCH? Or would the idea still be to have the x86 still virtualized? Also, how would a DPU solution work with a high end FPGA, since there must remain some level of protection at the hardware level. For example, Amazon completely abstracts the programming aspect of their F1 cards, where the clients cannot generate and don't have access to the bitstreams (instead they use handles which lookup the bitstream via an internal Amazon database). It would be incredibly easy for a customer to destroy one of the F1 cards either intentionally or unintentionally if that layer of protection was not there.
So that is in many ways the idea of the DPU. Allow the host system to be untrusted and manage infrastructure starting with the DPU. It is very much like AWS Nitro
@@ServeTheHomeVideo The concern there would be protecting the hardware itself though. For example, I could probably write some bad value to a configuration register or attack the BIOS directly on a Xeon, which disables the CPU thermal protection. I.e. do something that physically destroys the system. AWS Nitro is very interesting, and it looks like they have a few solutions to system protection... for one, the flash storage for firmware can't be accessed by customer software, so that prevents malicious modifications. And they have their lightweight hypervisor which presumably would protect the hardware from damage. I'm not sure what they would do for bare metal though... perhaps their customers take on the liability of replacing the hardware if their software causes physical damage? Also, it looks like Nitro does not have any accelerated nodes, so no FPGAs or GPUs. I would imagine that's a combination of fear of damage coupled with drivers (though the FPGA drivers can be trivial and are usually custom to the application).
Inn after amd announced they are going to buy xilinx. With the explanation here it seems they are trying to get more foothold into the server market with it. Where maybe they can be a one stop shop for a complete server system? I don't know
It pains me that 10gbe isn't standard on desktops by now. It should have quickly followed NVMe (2016 M.2 =~30-40gbe). But, what I find most ridiculous is how BITS on Windows10 is still set to 10mb/s by default. 1 megabyte per second for file synchronisation. WHY!?🤷♂️
I don't think STH is targeted at your general IT-savy crowd. 😉 For those of us who do understand this stuff, Patrick's reviews are just about the perfect level of detail.
More likely they'll make motherboards use these instead of x86, after all they exist to move data from or to some storage mechanism which probably still needs the chassis.
I am sorry but it's hilarious to think that we have these very advanced designs and architecture for building an overall computer, and it all still connects up to a processor running a 40 year old ISA.
I know buddy, that was more tounge in cheek....but now that I think about it, maybe we should see how well the Bluefield 3/4 will mine some RandomXMonero baby! Now that's a benchmark!
I think you explain it badly. But it's also may just be a bad term. We will see. How about just called it a Processing Unit. Computers use to have just one processing unit. It's would have devices that relied on the CPU for all it's processing. Nowadays plug in cards and devices have their own processors and maybe firmware designed with an operating system and application paradime rather than just direct machine code. For example motherboards having remote administration; often it just an embedded processor with onboard firmware that encapsulates a Linux kernel and software. This is also obviously graphics cards and chips. It's has main processors that control specialty processors. They now feature their own operating systems and while designed for graphics can be utilized other types of processing to possibly lesser efficiency. People used them for crypto mining until someone designed ASIC processing cards designed for more efficient crypto processing. TLDR; PC's are now full of multiple processing units and they are getting more powerful. With stuff like VMWARE on some of these distributed chips you can milk even more processing and functionality from them. This is all hinting at the PC evolving into more of what is called a backplane design which is how supercomputers are currently constructed. Problems with this are speed of light, electrical interference, and power consumption required to do their tasks. Hence people are working on optical interconnects for short range transmission; bus and chip to chip. When you hear DPU just think embedded processor.
How so? STH is the largest traditional hands-on server, storage, and networking review website. Our UA-cam is still very small which is more of just a fun project for me. We test all of the highest-end servers, have done 100GbE switches, and etc. Despite having "home" in the name 11+ years ago when we started, it is somewhat like the how Wall Street Journal has branched out to cover more than just a single street in NYC. :-)
I was afraid in first that it would be difficult to understand. 🙃 guess i was wrong. yeah yeah yeahs got this one ☝️ i know right great 👍 How comes that a completely new interface device is so developed and integrated before it is even on the market.
I remember back in the 90's we had network processors and Database processors as well in some of your servers and even a dedicated token ring processor!
Wow that was really densely packed with information and acronyms. My take away a DPU is a computer within a computer that can present remote assets as "native / local" to the DPU's host machine. If that wasn't it I guess I'll have to watch again.
Right now i am feeling like a hick from the sticks looking at my thinkstation in a differnet light
Yes, exactly....I would add to that faster overall NIC speeds up to 200Gbps and Encryption offloading which is HUGE.
I agree. It's a computer inside another computer to compute all the 'software defined ' that was supposed to run at the host computer, but as that trick didn't worked out because it is complicated and slowed down the host, so let's implement in a separate hardware.
@@fwingebritson same here.
Now having the Mellanox NICs onboard to the Ampre accelerators makes so much more sense. Thanks!
It’s very cool these can remove the x86 completely from the solution. For data center x86 is probably the wrong solution for a lot of the actual problem space. This allows them to break away from the 1980s vintage x86 architecture cruft and engineer them specifically towards a network solution.
Yippee, thankyou for getting the audio sorted. So much better.
Thanks for noticing
Firmware nightmare. I can already feel the pain that all those poor souls will have to suffer in the future dealing with all that unavoidable shitstorm of bugs.
running Vmware in your NIC... do you dare to upgrade to a major release you servers in another continent (while pandemic)? the ultimate IT challenge :D
@FolkSoulja7487 and how exactly does Docker or Qemu will help you with buggy Smart NIC firmware?
ua-cam.com/video/aiCCUFXxVEA/v-deo.html post copy migration if you have a NIC specific error and the instance reaches the threshold post copy migration and pre copy migration avoid firmware bugs. Again if you utilize the latest Qemu as a hypervisor and docker as a container deployer your NIC specific issue will be non issue. VMware although the industry standard is quickly losing ground to alternatives like the highly revision Qemu now able to launch in seconds not minutes and now able to host low latency applications through software accelerated hardware emulation. With so many different endpoint operating systems and platforms and build versions it's all about staying ahead of the curve
It was so difficult to explain to other people the difference between firmware and software, and now the lines will be much more blurred.
Absolutely true, and only a small segment of these "DPU" devices will have well-developed firmware with good long term support. Most will be cases where main chipset producer puts out rushed "example" firmware, and then the integrators do a simple repackaging of that. And a short time later it will be abandonware.
I have a tiny amount of insight into a large cloud provider, and they end up bringing ALL of the firmware in-house (and I mean ALL) so they can adequately support it. The large cloud providers end up with more insight into how the hardware performs than any of the actual hardware manufacturers are ever able to gather.
What a fancy way to describe "Infiniband"...
No more Infiniband, RDMA over converged ethernet is a new king!
This is called "edge computing" or "fog computing". It basically represents a stage of preprocessing before they reach the host server.
DPUs are a bit different. They can be located in the server on a PCIe card instead of as edge devices. They can be at the edge as well, but adoption is in the hyper scale data center first, then expanding elsewhere
Excellent video. Thank you for a clear explanation of what a DPU's function. It makes a lot of sense. It allows the host server CPUs to focus on running the OS and applications while the DPUs provide all the underlying server fabric services required by the CPUs such as storage, networking etc. in a very modular (or virtualized), scalable, and resilient architecture.
it feels like we are now going back to the ways of a mainframe (while still calling the actual mainframes outdated) :))
Never knew this, good to know where the technology is going
adds a new attack surface, including non secure boot, closed source firmware blobs, reliablility issues, especially when combined with encryption, virtual networking, deep packet inspection, ai supervised data filtering.
this is such a underrated video. Amazing! thanks for this!
I’m rewatching this video and now I want a Raspberry Pi CM4 in a DPU for consumers. Leveraging the efficiency of ARM in our “obsolete” x86 machines.
Very good and interesting video! However, you got me lost when you started talking about baremetal provisioning. Can you create a separate video WITH DIAGRAMS PLEASE explaining everything you said about baremetal provisioning?
Thank you for video (and accompanying article) 👍
Look fwd to finding out more about DPU H/W integration with terraform, ansible, cloud init, kickstart, chef
Kind regards, neighbours and friends.
Great presentation! I needed that level of explaination. QUESTION: Is there a DPU for the little guy that has a few servers, or simply a guy that wants to learn hot to program these DPUs. Great expertise comes from practice, if you knwo what I mean. I sense that the demand for competent software engineers in DPUs will skyrocket ...if not already. It would be nice to see a Linux based OS for these.
There's not really anything new in computing - ideas come back and are reimplemented in new niches. This is similar to I/O channel processors from the 1970s.
thewheelieguy there is, but its something how old ideas (some that we’re already implemented) come back in and out.
Thank you for an excellent well laid out presentation of a new technology and probable future trend
Is it a “Programable Data Processor” unit? Maybe PDP for short?
It’s a computer in your computer. Not a new idea, IO processors were common on mainframes.
well it's a lot like a full sized machine but smaller and not as powerful as the main "frame", so maybe "minicomputer"?
Didn't Intel had Xeon Phi's for highly parallel workloads
Yo dawg, I heard you like hypervisors. I see this as taking a small bit of load off the vmkernel. Seems geared towards a MUCH bigger datacenter than what most of us will be touching for years. Still very interesting though.
That is the case at 10GbE speeds. As we get to 100GbE speeds, and with high-end storage/ accelerators, there are different pressures on the kernel. PCIe Gen4 (and later Gen5 in 2021/2022) will make it more difficult for CPUs and memory to keep up with the type of traffic the storage and network can generate.
Great explanation
Very well done, in depth but understandable!
Great overview of this space! Thanks!
Glad you liked it!
So if I understand correctly this are super high performance NIC's designed to work with distributed network attached storage and graphics and present those devices to the host system as if they were local devices?
Might these be relevant in the /r/HomeLab circuit in 8+ years, or are they strictly for data centers/HPC the same way POWER and FPGAs are?
I think there are going to be quite a few VMware professionals who will buy one of these DPU NICs to get ahead on implementing Project Monterey. When it hits GA being able to show a lab demo setup/ experience is going to be a differentiator for employers and clients. Plus, seeing the demo of ESXi running on a Bluefield-2 NIC is crazy cool.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I would ask my employer to fund it as a research project
Given the data speeds we're talking that make these worthwhile, it's likely homelabs won't require these for a long time, unless you run services for people in your homelab or play with it because work.
Of course, that's never stopped anyone, so yeah we'll see them in homelabs when hardware refreshes come through.
Really curious what BPF will bring for the DPU space
Can you recommend a "first exploration" DPU for those DevOps who want to try the capability of a DPU?
Get a NVIDIA BlueField-2. NVIDIA is pushing to the DevOps community right now and has the easiest to setup
If these became mature, it would be easy to turn them inside out, so the motherboard has a DPU in the middle and a big PCIe 5 CXL root thing, then you slot in modules of CPUs, GPUs, Memory, Storage as needed, with all resources connecting over a pcie 5 network.
Quite interested to learn about those nitro cards AWS developed, any links to talks on them? (Preferably at level a tech enthusiast rather than Sysop could understand)
It's servers, servers all the way down!
Yo dawg, we heard you like servers, so we put servers in your servers in your servers.
For your servers to serve other servers.
I remember OS/2 Warp allowed you to share devices...... I also remember distributed systems which shared CPUs and storage.
@ServeTheHome 5:24 has an editing error where you duplicate your statement about vsan.
Yea :-/ This is something I realized that we had in our VMworld coverage but at 7AM this morning thought "hey maybe not everyone knows what a DPU is... maybe I should do a video..." Need to work on that for the next one but this is actually the shortest time to go from zero to video + companion piece we have had. Just need to get the workflow down a bit better.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo It's not an issue for me, I just wanted to point it out in case you want to fix the video and hadn't noticed it. Sometimes after you watch something so many times, you just can't see anything wrong anymore :)
That is certainly what happened. I had no idea you could edit this later in YT's editor. We shall see if that works! Thanks.
Any recommendations on a small, and plausibly (relatively) cheap way to lab this setup? Maybe 2 DPUs on a low-ish end server that can run several VMs?
Depends on how small. You can put them in servers so long as they can cool the cards. For a bigger lab, we have something we will be showing as part of an upcoming series testing these, but that is a 5U chassis.
... very much a noob here but couldn't a dpu be used to agragate a program exicutable that traditionally would run in a single core on multiple cores and possibly a second dpu to reconsolidate that that data making the program run more quickly and efficiently....dpu to dpu communication to understand what should be done and what should be expected... Thus taking a task traditionally exicuted as one thread and at least computationaly speeding it up... Sounds doable and given latency of data vs single thread proformance may be viable? Just thinking of the cores as servers and the dpu's as hypervisor's on a macro scale. Given that the components can't be miniaturized to fit onto a single chip solution yet. I can only see this being viable in the server space but if possible could lead to things like gameing servers running faster than the best desktop counterparts.
Some of the first applications for this are creating composable infrastructure so you can pull in storage and accelerators and make a local server think remote resources are local. In theory you could aggregate more than that but for single thread execution it is hard because hitting network is orders of magnitude higher latency than staying on chip/ package.
We have a DPU, her name is Marge, she's got a 104 bit bus, and a double data rate pipeline at about 2.6Hz
She's about 58 years old and thinking about retiring
Sounds like Steam Processing, it's pretty common in finance and database programming. A hardware-accelerated version makes sense, but it will vary wildly on the data format and what you are doing with it. On Windows/ x86 context switches and exceptions are very heavy and any performance targets will quickly go out of the window, so I can see the appeal of MIPS here.🤔
Divide bandwidth by cache/ process(s) and that's how much time you have to analyse the data, it's like an extreme version of hot potato. Sure you can buffer the data, but it quickly reaches a point where it isn't live, and Goodluck writing it to disk or replaying it...
Actually after thinking about it. These would be great at sorting/ filtering data before routing it to other systems where the load could be greatly reduced. They aren't actually that dissimilar to firewalls, it's just the use case that differs.
Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
Are you asking if it runs pfSense?
where can i buy these second hand? what do i look for, fancy playing with these on my PC
Still not many available second hand as they are pretty new. Sometimes people post them in the STH forums great deals section when they are on ebay
in a couple of years our devices will be a small arm CPU with a huge DPU that interfaces with all the hardware that we want (Big CPUs, GPUs, RAM, Disks).
Be prepared to pay to have more ram and just "download" it to your device.
I wonder what building a datacentre using these does to latency for storage and GPU access.
This is effectively what the modern cloud providers are already doing.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo sure, but it would be interesting to quantify the impact of nvme over ethernet compared to direct attached nvme over virtio. I always anticipate some kind of overhead on the cloud, i wonder how much this contributes.
William Leslie exactly, I’m not sure how their getting around that.
So, a math coprocessor ala 386DX v2020
Quite a bit more than that actually. These run their own OS/ Hypervisor distinct from a host system.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo pretty similar to the Xeon Phi cards in that regard
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I was just jiving! :) Thank you for the great content!
Well, the math coprocessor of the 386-era would actually be the 80387 :) But you would pick the Weitek 1167 - a non-Intel math coprocessor to the 80386, that was rare as a unicorn and would cost you a kidney and your firstborn along with all your cash back in the day
@@virtualinfinity6280 Look at the big brain on Brett! That's right! The metric system! :D
This is weird. It doesnt seem complex. I think I understand what is going on. I'd really like to test this out!
Sooooo, could I use a DPU to run pfsense, and function as my router?
Check the main site tomorrow!
Wouldn't allowing the customer to run a bare metal server pose a hardware security risk? I.e. if the main x86 has internal configurations (e.g. via BIOS calls or BIOS security flaws) that can result in system bricking, or the ability to update the BIOS flash via the PCH? Or would the idea still be to have the x86 still virtualized?
Also, how would a DPU solution work with a high end FPGA, since there must remain some level of protection at the hardware level. For example, Amazon completely abstracts the programming aspect of their F1 cards, where the clients cannot generate and don't have access to the bitstreams (instead they use handles which lookup the bitstream via an internal Amazon database). It would be incredibly easy for a customer to destroy one of the F1 cards either intentionally or unintentionally if that layer of protection was not there.
So that is in many ways the idea of the DPU. Allow the host system to be untrusted and manage infrastructure starting with the DPU. It is very much like AWS Nitro
@@ServeTheHomeVideo The concern there would be protecting the hardware itself though. For example, I could probably write some bad value to a configuration register or attack the BIOS directly on a Xeon, which disables the CPU thermal protection. I.e. do something that physically destroys the system.
AWS Nitro is very interesting, and it looks like they have a few solutions to system protection... for one, the flash storage for firmware can't be accessed by customer software, so that prevents malicious modifications. And they have their lightweight hypervisor which presumably would protect the hardware from damage. I'm not sure what they would do for bare metal though... perhaps their customers take on the liability of replacing the hardware if their software causes physical damage?
Also, it looks like Nitro does not have any accelerated nodes, so no FPGAs or GPUs. I would imagine that's a combination of fear of damage coupled with drivers (though the FPGA drivers can be trivial and are usually custom to the application).
Thanks.
Inn after amd announced they are going to buy xilinx. With the explanation here it seems they are trying to get more foothold into the server market with it. Where maybe they can be a one stop shop for a complete server system? I don't know
What manages which stream goes to the cpu/dpu/gpu?
Xeon D
That sounds a lot like mainframes' SAPs (system assistance processors)...
so... RDMA? are we still using infiniband cables?
It pains me that 10gbe isn't standard on desktops by now. It should have quickly followed NVMe (2016 M.2 =~30-40gbe).
But, what I find most ridiculous is how BITS on Windows10 is still set to 10mb/s by default. 1 megabyte per second for file synchronisation. WHY!?🤷♂️
I wonder if he envisions thousands of pairs of glazed over eyes with blank faces staring back at him.
I don't think STH is targeted at your general IT-savy crowd. 😉 For those of us who do understand this stuff, Patrick's reviews are just about the perfect level of detail.
How long before they decide to put a case on the DPUs and skip putting it inside another computer? :)
More likely they'll make motherboards use these instead of x86, after all they exist to move data from or to some storage mechanism which probably still needs the chassis.
I am sorry but it's hilarious to think that we have these very advanced designs and architecture for building an overall computer, and it all still connects up to a processor running a 40 year old ISA.
Nvidia buys Melanox, and now we have the dpu 😂
Intel product upcoming a la Ghost Canyon NUC 9 Extreme?
Wait when you say "crypto" do you mean monero?
Ha! These are more designed for offloading cryptography used for things like IPsec.
I know buddy, that was more tounge in cheek....but now that I think about it, maybe we should see how well the Bluefield 3/4 will mine some RandomXMonero baby! Now that's a benchmark!
Does a dpu have any uses for home pcs?
As I watch this video (I'm 2:00 in) this reads like they're trying to reinvent DMA. LOL.
Gaming System: But can it run Crysis?
DPU Datacenter Loadout: But can it run F@H?
I think you explain it badly. But it's also may just be a bad term. We will see. How about just called it a Processing Unit.
Computers use to have just one processing unit. It's would have devices that relied on the CPU for all it's processing.
Nowadays plug in cards and devices have their own processors and maybe firmware designed with an operating system and application paradime rather than just direct machine code. For example motherboards having remote administration; often it just an embedded processor with onboard firmware that encapsulates a Linux kernel and software.
This is also obviously graphics cards and chips. It's has main processors that control specialty processors. They now feature their own operating systems and while designed for graphics can be utilized other types of processing to possibly lesser efficiency. People used them for crypto mining until someone designed ASIC processing cards designed for more efficient crypto processing.
TLDR; PC's are now full of multiple processing units and they are getting more powerful. With stuff like VMWARE on some of these distributed chips you can milk even more processing and functionality from them. This is all hinting at the PC evolving into more of what is called a backplane design which is how supercomputers are currently constructed. Problems with this are speed of light, electrical interference, and power consumption required to do their tasks. Hence people are working on optical interconnects for short range transmission; bus and chip to chip.
When you hear DPU just think embedded processor.
can i game on this!!🐿
This product certainly strays far from the mission of STH, being expensive and only really useful in a corporate environment with 40G+ networking.
How so? STH is the largest traditional hands-on server, storage, and networking review website. Our UA-cam is still very small which is more of just a fun project for me. We test all of the highest-end servers, have done 100GbE switches, and etc. Despite having "home" in the name 11+ years ago when we started, it is somewhat like the how Wall Street Journal has branched out to cover more than just a single street in NYC. :-)
that shirt color is a bit too close to #E20074 for my taste
Ha - on screen it is showing as ~d6083b via Photoshop frame export.
I was afraid in first that it would be difficult to understand. 🙃 guess i was wrong. yeah yeah yeahs got this one ☝️ i know right great 👍
How comes that a completely new interface device is so developed and integrated before it is even on the market.
Imagine being used for mining.
computers all the way down.
So how long before someone runs doom on one of these 😂
I have seen it already done.
All I see is another threat vector.
Can you mine on it ? lol
Patrick, if you show less of yourself and more of the graphics, we would love you more. That
would be so much more helpful. Thanks