It has been some time since we covered a new DPU, but the new Xsight Labs E1 DPU looks cool. The DPU comes with either 32 or 64 Arm Neoverse N2 cores, up to 2x 400Gbps networking, and 32x configurable PCIe Gen5 lanes.
Xsight Labs E1 DPU Overview
The Xsight Labs E1 DPU is designed to be very flexible. Built around Arm Neoverse N2 cores, the SoC has a number of accelerators as well as high-speed SerDes. There is also a DDR5 memory complex and more onboard. Here is the chip’s block diagram.
On one end, the cards built around this can have a PCIe Gen5 x16 host connection and then can configure the second set of PCIe Gen5 x16 lanes to connect to other devices. As such, there are a number of different deployment models and the company has a list of examples.
One of the more interesting is that it can have a PCIe Gen5 x16 link to the host system, then use the other x16 lanes in a x4x4x4x4 root configuration to connect four NVMe SSDs to the server. That deployment model is fascinating since you have plenty of CPU power on the DPU to power things like RAID across the SSDs. Perhaps the more exciting use case there is being able to combine high-capacity network storage delivered over 400GbE with local caching.
The DPU also supports features like a 128GB M.2 SSD for the DPU’s local OS storage, NVMeoF offloads, line rate AES-GCM crypto offloads, and more.
Final Words
These DPUs are fascinating because they offer a lot in a PCIe card. Especially with these Arm Neoverse N2 DPUs, they behave a lot like mini-servers inside larger servers. This is Arm SystemReady certified so it can run unmodified Linux distributions like Ubuntu and SONiC.
The NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU has become popular due to NVIDIA’s AI server dominance, but all major cloud providers have their own DPUs. NVIDIA also charges a lot for its DPUs making room for companies like Xsight Labs and the E1. Hopefully one day we will get hands on with these cards and be able to show you
32x PCIe 5.0×16 is wary strange wording because i assumed at first 512 lanes and that can’t be write.
When will some prospective company make a workstation based on this?
@Ricardo Bánffy The vendor already offers an “E1-800 Edge Server” in 1U. (comment system appears to dislike links; but that should get you the result)
Not ideal if you want the ‘can coexist with’ sort of workstation; thousand watt PSU and 40mm fans are lousy company; but the board inside is presumably already about right for workstation purposes. 4 DIMM slots, couple of PCIe slots, m.2
Seems to me that if such a thing is affordable, it would make a good chip for something like the Mikrotik ROSE server. Smart SAN?
are these DPUs released? if so, how does the price compare with the BF3?