Comments on: Economics And The Inevitability Of The DPU https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/11/03/economics-and-the-inevitability-of-the-dpu/ In-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds. Mon, 14 Nov 2022 17:32:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 By: spuwho https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/11/03/economics-and-the-inevitability-of-the-dpu/#comment-200770 Mon, 14 Nov 2022 15:05:31 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=141449#comment-200770 Don’t complain about needing DPU’s when Intel continuously adds yet more functionality in their core CPU functionality. How many ethernet chips offload checksum’s to the SSE capability? How many new apps that need vector processing offload it all to the AVX capabilities? Ever since Intel tried to run soft modems via their MMX extensions, they have been centralizing yet more distributed functions and lowering the cost of the software to support said function. Even Intel based NIC’s used to process MACSEC in the packet processor, not anymore.

]]> By: Dmitri K https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/11/03/economics-and-the-inevitability-of-the-dpu/#comment-200610 Thu, 10 Nov 2022 21:54:42 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=141449#comment-200610 Can’t quite figure why in the last table servers with DPU use 481W vs. 728W without DPU. I assumed these are the same servers, just fewer of them. Wouldn’t the DPU-equipped ones use more power than those without, given that the CPU will now do more work on workloads (supposedly consuming the same 728W), plus DPU using power on top of that?

I may be missing something, but it’s either leave the number of servers the same 10,000, or bump power of the reduced number of servers to 728W + whatever DPU is using, no?

]]> By: Timothy Prickett Morgan https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/11/03/economics-and-the-inevitability-of-the-dpu/#comment-200526 Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:35:21 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=141449#comment-200526 In reply to Bill Zipprich.

Don’t forget the IOPs in the System/38 and AS/400, which were literally Motorola 68K processors running hunks of the operating system kernel on the other side of the wire. Agreed!

]]> By: Bill Zipprich https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/11/03/economics-and-the-inevitability-of-the-dpu/#comment-200484 Tue, 08 Nov 2022 03:36:57 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=141449#comment-200484 The IBM mainframe solved this I/O issue long ago. They realized that interrupting the CPU for terminal activity or other I/O needs was madness. They have channels that do I/O and that includes disk access. Obviously DPU’s can be used to offload GUI activity as well. Apple of all people, had put IOP’s in the Mac II FX and Quadra 950. These were 6502 processors that only did I/O. Apple implemented the supporting software in System 6 but sadly deprecated the feature in System 7. It’s a mystery why they did that.

]]> By: Alan Walker https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/11/03/economics-and-the-inevitability-of-the-dpu/#comment-200350 Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:45:06 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=141449#comment-200350 It would be interesting to see the effect on licensed software, such as Oracle. If a VM is only running the licensed software and doesn’t also need to do IPsec, etc – then it could use fewer cores and pay a smaller license fee.

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