Home > Servers > PowerEdge and VMware > White Papers > DPUs in the new vSphere 8.0 and 16th Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers > So, what is a DPU?
DPUs are a new class of high-performance multi-core processors integrated with high-performance network interfaces, which are optimized to offload infrastructure processing tasks normally executed by the CPU. With DPUs, these tasks are now executed from their own onboard processors on the DPU. This role separation with the CPU focused on workload tasks and the DPU on infrastructure data processing, and security functions enhances the overall performance.