What’s a DPU?

What’s a DPU?
Of course, you’re probably already familiar with the Central Processing Unit or CPU. Flexible and responsive, for many years CPUs were the sole programmable element in most computers.
More recently the GPU, or graphics processing unit, has taken a central role . Originally used to deliver rich, real-time graphics, their parallel processing capabilities make them ideal for accelerated computing tasks of all kinds.
That’s made them the key to artificial intelligence, deep learning, and big data analytics applications.
Over the past decade, however, computing has broken out of the boxy confines of PC and servers — with CPUs and GPUs powering sprawling new hyperscale data centers .
These data centers are knit together with a powerful new category of processors . The DPU, or data processing unit, has become the third member of the data centric accelerated computing model.“This is going to represent one of the three major pillars of computing going forward,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during a talk earlier this month.
“The CPU is for general purpose computing, the GPU is for accelerated computing and the DPU, which moves data around the data center, does data processing.”
What's a DPU?

Data Processing Unit

Industry-standard, high-performance, software-programmable multi-core CPU

High-performance network interface

Flexible and programmable acceleration engines

So What Makes a DPU Different?
A DPU is a new class of programmable processor that combines three key elements. A DPU is a system on a chip, or SOC, that combines:
An industry standard, high-performance, software programmable, multi-core CPU, typically based on the widely-used Arm architecture, tightly coupled to the other SOC components
A high-performance network interface capable of parsing, processing, and efficiently transferring data at line rate, or the speed of the rest of the network, to GPUs and CPUs
A rich set of flexible and programmable acceleration engines that offload and improve applications performance for AI and Machine Learning, security, telecommunications, and storage, among others.
All these DPU capabilities are critical to enable an isolated, bare-metal, cloud-native computing that will define the next generation of cloud-scale computing .

DPUs: Incorporated into SmartNICs
The DPU can be used as a stand-alone embedded processor, but it’s more often incorporated into a SmartNIC , a network interface controller that’s  used as a key component in a next generation server.
Other devices that claim to be DPUs miss significant elements of these three critical capabilities that are fundamental to claiming to answer the question: What is a DPU?
DPUs can be used as a stand-alone embedded processor, but they’re more often incorporated into a SmartNIC, a network interface...