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Comment by cute_boi | Hacker News Reader

I think the use case is to reduce CPU usage. Its like GPU cards, but for networking.

By just reading the title you can tell it runs an Arm cpu with linux on it. Not really certain how useful that is.

I'm not sure where the confusion is. OP mentioned that his Linux system can already do routing. The purpose of this card is to remove that load from the computer. The manufacture suggests it can do up to 100Gbps which isn't trivial.

>>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.

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 (:

Mikrotik uses Annapurna ARM chips.

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+.

This NIC can reach wire-speed (100Gbps) with Jumbo frames.

To me, this suggests that it's packet-rate limited, and if so, it can really only be counted on to do 1500/9000 or ~16.6Gb/s with standard frames.

Products like this are, generally speaking, designed for service providers, where having more available host capacity directly translates to increased revenue.

Consider a cloud provider who offers virtual machines to users: the physical host machine typically is involved in whatever networking path is necessary (e.g. an SDN), as well as the control plane software for managing VMs, and other tidbits. Moving the entire networking and SDN layer off the host system and onto an accelerator card, with your own customizations to the data path, means you can take those host resources and use them for VMs instead -- effectively increasing the total amount of capacity you have available. It's not just CPU time either: things like this also effectively increase available PCIe bandwidth, memory bandwidth, etc, available to users, by moving the resources the operator needs elsewhere.

There are some other benefits too, like you can run the whole security framework on a card like this. Or QoS controls. You could for example rent out the entire bare metal server to someone more or less and use a device like this to implement throttling/QoS/SDN transparently.

Most of the vendors are calling these "Data Processing Units" or "Infrastructure Processing Units" or whatever, but the idea is all the same. Offloading the networking/data paths into accelerators allows you to offer more raw compute to your users. For example, Nvidia Bluefield or Intel's new Mount Evans IPU.

This Mikrotik is basically the bargain-bin version of those products. Which is actually pretty cool. I could actually use a couple of 25GbE breakouts for that price...

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