AMD Alveo U25 SmartNIC Accelerator

For cloud architects building modern data centers, the Alveo U25 provides a comprehensive SmartNIC Platform that brings true convergence of network, storage, and compute-acceleration functions onto a single platform. The U25 SmartNIC Platform is based on a powerful FPGA, enabling hardware acceleration and offload to happen inline with maximum efficiency while avoiding unnecessary data movements and CPU processing.

Key features

• Network Interface 2 x SFP28 (2 x 25 GbE)
• PCIe Interface Gen3
• Quad-core ARM® Cortex™-A53 MPCore™
• Form Factor HHHL and Passive Cooling

Additional features

• Adaptable SmartNIC Platform
  • Contains a programmable FPGA handling all network flows
  • Each flow can be individually delivered to the host and/or streamed in hardware to through bump-in-the-wire network acceleration functions and/or compute acceleration kernels for application processing within the FPGA
  • Supports both high-level network programming abstractions such as HLS and P4 programming language, as well as compute acceleration frameworks such as Vitis™ to enable both Xilinx and 3rd party accelerated applications
• A Powerful SmartNIC
  • The U25 delivers ultra-high throughput, small packet performance, and low-latency
  • The host interface supports standard NIC drivers as well as Onload® kernel bypass to provide both TCP and packet-based APIs for network application acceleration
  • IEEE1588v2 precision timing protocol (PTP) is provided for applications that require synchronized time stamping of packets with single-digit nanosecond accuracy
• A Platform for Hardware-Accelerated Clouds
  • Cloud service providers are deploying SmartNIC fabrics to achieve virtual switching and micro-segmentation of services that scale linearly with CPU cores and network links
  • The U25 is a platform for the industry's first converged SmartNIC fabric, including shrink-wrapped applications
• The U25 Target Use Case Models
  • The SmartNIC Platform for e.g. In-Line Crypto Offload (IPSec and SSL/TLS), Distributed NIC Based Firewall, SDN Data Plane offload as bump-in-the-wire, Network Attached Compute Acceleration (ML, Video, Database, etc.), Analytics and Network Monitoring

Applications

• Communication Service Providers
• Application Acceleration