We said this a long time ago, and we are going to say it again now. One big reason that Intel paid $16.7 billion to buy FPGA maker Altera was that it

Intel Braces For DPU Hit, Awaits Jevon’s Paradox Bounce

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-15 00:30:03

We said this a long time ago, and we are going to say it again now. One big reason that Intel paid $16.7 billion to buy FPGA maker Altera was that it was hedging on the future of compute in the datacenter and that it could see how the hyperscalers and cloud builders might offload a lot of network, storage, and security functions from its Xeon CPU cores to devices like FPGAs. Given this, it was important to have FPGAs to catch that business, even if at reduced revenues and profits.

It has been six years since that deal went down, and our analysis of why Intel might buy Altera still stands on its merits, which we did ahead of the deal. It has perhaps taken more time for the Data Processing Unit, or DPU, to evolve from a SmartNIC, which is a network interface card with some brains on it to handle specific tasks offloaded from pricey CPU cores. Just to be different, Intel is now calling these advanced SmartNICs Infrastructure Processing Units, or IPUs, and they are distinct from CPUs, GPUs, and other XPUs like machine learning accelerators or other customer ASICs.

In the end, IPUs might have a mix of CPUs, XPUs, and other custom ASICs, in fact, based on the presentation given today by Navin Shenoy, who is general manager of the Data Platforms Group at the chip maker, at the online Six Five Summit hosted by Moor Insights and Futurum.