The growth and expansion of AI workloads is inspiring a re-imagining of data center architectures, with DPUs as a crucial offload option for traffic that might otherwise clog CPU resources.
The VMware Explore 2022 conference this week is proving to be a hive of news for how companies are tackling this need for new data center architecture approaches. Nvidia, Dell and VMware already chimed in with a DPU-focused solution, and now AMD has joined the party, announcing during the event that the DPU-based AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card, will be one of the first DPU solutions to support VMware vSphere 8 available from server vendors such as Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo.
VMware vSphere 8 is central to the new offerings from Nvidia, AMD and others, as it reconfigures IT infrastructure as a composable architecture with a goal of offloading infrastructure workloads such as networking, storage, and security from the CPU by leveraging the new vSphere Distributed Services Engine, according to a statement from AMD. This frees up valuable CPU cycles to be used for business functions and revenue generating applications.
Using the the vSpere and AMD Pensando combination for data center workload management also helps customers reduce operational costs and provides an added layer of security by isolating infrastructure services from server tenant workloads. Early customers of vSphere Distributed Services Engine, accelerated by AMD Pensando DPUs, include a leading financial services provider, a multi-cloud solutions hoster and a leading business applications company, the companies said.
“Performance, efficiency and security are integral components of competitive offerings within cloud computing and hyperconverged infrastructure,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Group, AMD. “VMware vSphere 8, running on AMD Pensando DPUs, is a key step in bringing the industry closer to composable hardware systems and truly pervasive heterogeneous computing. AMD is uniquely positioned in the industry to deliver performance, efficiency and security with a distributed services platform that is currently deployed with major customers including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft Azure, NetAPP, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud.”
“Organizations are increasingly seeking IT infrastructure that is composable and delivers a cloud-like experience wherever their data lives,” added Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies and BuyerView Research, IDC. “AMD Pensando’s volume deployments with cloud providers are a clear indication of the capabilities of the platform, we expect to see a high degree of interest from enterprises interested in vSphere Distributed Services Engine deployments.”
AMD is Ryzen
Also this week, AMD unveiled the Ryzen 7000 Series Desktop processor lineup powered by the new Zen 4 architecture. Featuring up to 16 cores, 32 threads and built on an optimized, high-performance, TSMC 5nm process node, the Ryzen 7000 Series processorstarget higher performance for gamers and content creators, among others.
For example, the Ryzen 7950X processor enables single-core performance improvement of up to +29%, up to 45% more compute for content creators in POV Ray, up to 15% faster gaming performance in select titles, and up to 27% better performance-per-watt when compared to previous generation processors.