A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capabilities to your servers

Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by xxs on Monday March 28, 2022 @01:11PM (#30832845)

>>reduce CPU usage. Its like GPU cards,

It uses another CPU to do that. GPU is fundamentally different, high memory bandwidth, embarrassingly parallel, virtually no branches, and what not. That's just using a different CPU to do more CPU, and using the same OS the host already runs.

Then it requires its own security maintenance (+training) and patches.

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Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by benou on Monday March 28, 2022 @01:33PM (#30833151)

Personally I think one of the real usecase for smartnic is isolation: for a cloud provider, you can rent a bare metal instance and run all your networking security stack (think encapsulation, filtering, throttling etc) on the smartnic.

IOW the customer has full control of the host, but the cloud provider manages the smartnic. Incidentally, this is exactly what AWS does with their ENA adapters designed by... (ex-?)Anapurna Lab they bought some years ago (:

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Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by jabart on Monday March 28, 2022 @02:39PM (#30833980)

Mikrotik uses Annapurna ARM chips.

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Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by jotm on Monday March 28, 2022 @02:20PM (#30833744)

I think the analogy was that a CPU can do a GPU's job, but a GPU will do it much faster.

Pretty much all modern NICs are already using separate hardware to reduce the load on the main CPU. I.e. using a different CPU to do more CPU.

Without that you're looking at sacrificing a whole core or two just to handle 1Gbps, nevermind 10+.

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