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The AMD Pensando™ Distributed Services Card powered by the industry’s most advanced data processing unit (DPU) helps customers reduce operational costs by: By Unifying workload management, improving performance by freeing up CPU resources.Providing an added layer of security by isolating infrastructure services from server tenant workloads.
Figure 5. AMD Pensando DPU
AMD Pensando solutions bring Hyperscale DPU technology with its fully programmable P4 DPU, optimized to run network, storage, and security services from the data center to the cloud. AMD Pensando Distributed Services Cards-DSC, enable the use of the VMware vSphere Distributed Services Engine, with its P4-packet processing pipelines with embedded ARM CPUs complex, compression, crypto, and hardware offload engines in an integrated cache coherent interconnect.
Figure 6. AMD Pensando DPU Architecture
The AMD Pensando architecture’s networking Path P4 pipelines process every packet entering and leaving the device, while the Packet Buffer switches packets between P4 pipelines and memory domains. The P4-controlled DMA engines bridge the packet and memory domains. The Network On-Chip (NOC) connects P4 with offload engines, ARM complex, PCIe, and DRAM and for the storage acceleration, the storage, and crypto offloads operate on hardware queues controlled by P4, ARM complex or host CPU. In storage offloads, the compress/decompress offloads can appear as PCIe devices, data integrity engines operate at 200 Gbps and deduplication support is based on SHA2 and SHA3 engines. With Elba, AMD Pensando switched from High-Bandwidth Memory-HBM, memory to DDR 4/5 to increase the memory size and keep the cost low.
The Pensando Distributed Services Platform offers a suite of robust software services packages that implement cloud infrastructure functions for advanced networking, enhanced storage, advanced security, advanced observability, and cutting-edge security features. AMD provides a combined solution with AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Pensando DPU, and GPU accelerators featuring VMware vSphere 8 Distributed Services Engine. This combined solution ntot only improves the performance of network and storage, but also increases the efficiency and security of the infrastructure.