Xilinx delivers an FPGA-powered SmartNIC

Xilinx introduced its Alveo U25 SmartNIC for accelerating network, storage and compute acceleration functions.

The Alveo U25 SmartNIC, which is currently sampling, is powered by an FPGA-based engine that supports full programmability and turnkey accelerated applications. Xilinx says its FPGA-powered SmartNIC deliver higher throughput that SoC-based NICs or ASIC based solutions.

Targeted workloads include SDN, virtual switching, NFV, NVMe-oF, electronic trading, AI inference, video transcoding, and data analytics. The first accelerated application available is support for Open vSwitch (OVS) offload and acceleration. Xilinx claims its solution will offload over 90 percent of OVS processing from the server to improve packet throughput by over 5X. Future turnkey solutions from Xilinx are planned for security functions such as IPSec, SSL/TLS, AES-256/128, and distributed firewall as well as AI inference acceleration.

“The SmartNIC market is forecast to surpass $600M and comprise 23 percent of the worldwide Ethernet adapter market by 2024,” according to Baron Fung, research director at Dell’Oro Group. “As cloud service providers scale capacity upwards, they are increasing their deployment of SmartNICs to free up valuable CPU cores for business applications, optimizing server utilization. The telco service providers, another market with strong growth potential, are looking to integrate SmartNICs from the core to the edge of the network for applications such as NFV and AI inferencing. FPGA-based SmartNICs such as the Alveo U25 are well positioned to address this growing market opportunity.”

“Today’s cloud infrastructures suffer from critical data bottlenecks caused by server I/O,” said Donna Yasay, vice president of marketing, Data Center Group at Xilinx. “With up to 30 percent of data center compute resources allocated for networking I/O processing, overhead continues to grow along with CPU cores. Xilinx is addressing the challenges resulting from the increased demands on networking by providing an easier to deploy SmartNIC with turnkey accelerated applications and out-of-the-box capabilities that go far beyond fundamental networking.”

In addition, Xilinx announced its first XtremeScale Ethernet adapter card in the Open Compute Project (OCP) Spec 3.0 form factor and a proof of concept for the world’s first FPGA-based OCP Accelerator Module (OAM). The new XtremeScale X2562 10/25Gb Ethernet adapter card is designed for high-performance electronic trading environments and enterprise data centers, the X2562 features sub-microsecond latency and high throughput with ultra-scale connectivity for real-time packet and flow information to thousands of virtual NICs. The X2562 is currently sampling and will be generally available in the second calendar quarter of 2020.