Xilinx has brought out a product which combines networking, storage, acceleration and compute functions on a single device called a SmartNIC

SmartNIC is designed to bring greater efficiency and lower TCO to cloud service providers, telcos, and private cloud data centre operators

The Alveo U25 SmartNIC combines a SmartNIC platform with an FPGA-based engine that supports full programmability and turnkey accelerated applications.

The U25 delivers a comprehensive SmartNIC platform to address demands and workloads such as SDN, virtual switching, NFV, NVMe-oF, electronic trading, AI inference, video transcoding, and data analytics.

Thecp Alveo U25 SmartNIC provides higher throughput and a fmore adaptable engine than SoC-based NICs to allow cloud architects to accelerate a wide range of functions and applications quickly.

The platform enables ‘bump-in-the-wire’ network, storage, and compute offload and acceleration functions for maximum efficiency by avoiding unnecessary data movements and CPU processing.

This reduces the CPU burden and reclaims resources to run more applications. Embedded ARM processors provide control plane processing to support emerging bare metal server use cases.

The Alveo U25 SmartNIC platform enables turnkey accelerated applications that make it easier for non-tier-1 cloud data center operators to deploy SmartNICs and quickly reap the benefits.

The device supports turnkey applications from both Xilinx and independent software vendors.

The programming model supports high-level network programming abstractions such as HLS and P4, as well as compute acceleration frameworks such as the Vitis unified software platform to enable Xilinx and third party accelerated applications.

The first out-of-the-box accelerated application available on the Alveo U25 SmartNIC is support for Open vSwitch (OVS) offload and acceleration.

The plug-and-play 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 Alveo U25 SmartNIC is currently sampling with early access customers. General availability is expected in Q3.