They are data center oriented
Nvidia today unveiled a very unusual solution, part of the Bluefield family. For starters, it is worth mentioning that Bluefield is a brand of Mellanox, which previously became part of Nvidia. Nvidia itself calls the new items data processing unit (DPU).
Nvidia has combined an Arm processor, an Ampere GPU, and a Mellanox network adapter on a single board. Bluefield-2 and Bluefield-2X introduced
There are two new products. The first is less unusual. Called Bluefield-2, it is essentially a Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx NIC plus an Arm architecture processor. More specifically, it is based on a single-chip system with eight Cortex-A72 programmable processor cores, two VLIW cores, and a ConnectX-6 Dx network core. This solution is needed to offload the CPU of the system that will use Bluefield-2. The very same novelty is intended for data centers. Nvidia claims that a single Bluefield-2 DPU can replace 125 processor cores in a given context.
A pair of network ports with a data transfer rate of 100 Gb / s, or one with a speed of 200 Gb / s, 8 or 16 GB of DDR4 memory onboard, support for vSwitch / vRouter, NAT, NFV, IDS / IPS and much more can be noted. The card is available in different form factors: HHHL, FHHL, and OCP 3.0 SFF.
But the second novelty is much more interesting – Bluefield-2X. Here, on the same board, the same single-chip system as in Bluefield-2, as well as the Ampere generation GPUs, coexist! It is true, which graphics processor is used, is not reported, but it is known that the performance of tensor cores of this GPU is 60 TOPS. Unfortunately, so far this does not give an understanding of the level of the graphics core, but visually we are talking about a fairly large GPU. Why is he needed there? Nvidia is talking about using its tensor cores to speed up AI tasks. For example, to analyze the security level of a system in real-time, including detecting abnormal traffic, analyzing encrypted traffic, and so on.
Bluefield-2 is expected on Nvidia’s partner systems next year, but Bluefield-2X is under development, although it should also be released next year.
