AMD To Acquire Pensando in a $1.9 Billion Bid for Networking Tech (protocol.com) 12
AMD said early Monday that it plans to acquire networking chip maker Pensando for $1.9 billion in cash, in a bid to arm itself with tech that competes with directly with Nvidia and Intel's data-center chip packages. From a report: Pensando was founded by several former Cisco engineers, and makes edge computing technology that competes with AWS Nitro, Intel's DPU launched last year, and Nvidia's data processing units called BlueField. In a release distributed in advance of the announcement, AMD said that buying the closely held Pensando will give it a networking platform that will bolster its existing server chip lineup. Pensando's chips are an increasingly important part of data center design, as it becomes impossible to simply throw larger numbers of processors at demanding computing tasks. As regular chips scale up, the networking connections become a bottleneck, and the DPU's goal (Intel calls it an IPU) is to free up the central processor to perform other functions.
10gbe (Score:2)
OKAY, does this mean we can FINALLY get decent 10gbe NICs on AMD desktop motherboards too!? This has been my absolute #1 annoyance as an AMD desktop consumer, I need faster networking for the work I do. Add-in cards are not always an option for various reasons.
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Sorry, but probably no. Pensando is a smart-nic company, and thus expensive. I don't think you'd ever see their chips on a desktop system board, as their chip would probably cost more than the board itself.
If someone wants to put 10GbE on a desktop system board, it's probably going to be a broadcom or similar, until realtek or someone comes out with a 10GbE chip. Even then, the broadcom parts would probably double the cost of the board.
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1. Really? I've never heard that. That would be supremely odd to bother, since a NIC would waste precious pins and having NIC-on-CPU. Also if that were the case, then I would not expect the AMD motherboards bothering to add third-party nics like they do.
2. No, it won't be mainstream. Generally speaking these smart nics are a regular nic with some sort of processing engine attached to the nic. So a substantial monetary and thermal cost. The use cases for smart nics are far from given yet in general (there
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I think the big use case for smartnics is in things like load balancing where things like SSL termination can be offloaded to the NIC. They have the potential to be quite good at things like firewall functionality also.
Some of them can do interesting things like boot-to-NVMeoF by presenting themselves to the system as a storage controller, and handling all the NVMeoF functionality on the NIC itself, also.
So, there are some interesting use cases for them, but still relatively niche, and as mentioned they te
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The chiplet design means the DPU would be best in the I/O chiplet which Global Foundries makes.
SSL termination on nic and not proxy? also in serv (Score:2)
SSL termination on nic and not proxy? also in server with VM's putting it on the hardware nic level is useless.
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In practice, SSL termination on smartnic would be a TLS proxy. SmartNICs are at this point almost all just a relatively lower performance open ended server running on a processor that *happens* to be colocated with the NIC chip. You get to manage a somewhat distinct server for relatively small benefit.
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time to go back to the mainframe, thin client stuff? cut out the middleman...um presentation layer....
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We've done the TLS offload dance before, though admittedly this time the engine being updateable software. The problem being that the overhead for TLS for the bandwidth given is an optimization that isn't enough to worry. Even more for firewalling, where the load for firewalling is trivial. NVMeoF is trying to keep the SAN strategy alive, but dedicated boot block storage without actually being in the system is just odd. Either go ahead and have local block in the system or boot to shared image to minimi
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If it was going mainstream [youtu.be] it would be in their Epyc or Threadripper line.
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AMD desktop motherboards
This about AMD, not about motherboard manufacturers. But it sounds like you're in the market for a GIGABYTE TRX40.
Personally, I don't see the big deal in adding a discrete ethernet card if you have a high speed LAN. Most users don't even use the LAN other than to connect to an upstream network that is much slower than that.
Add-in cards are not always an option for various reasons.
"Various" reasons of course being code for stupid reasons.
In fact, I'd go so far as to guess that you're triggered by certain brands, and so refuse to buy the ones that have the number of