3 ms·
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 compute
by 293984j29384 5y ago
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.
- xxs 5y ago>>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.
- benou 5y agoPersonally 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 (:
- jabart 5y agoMikrotik uses Annapurna ARM chips.
- jotm 5y agoI 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+.
- drewg123 5y agoThis 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.