For the past three years, I’ve been writing about SmartNICs. One of my most popular blog posts is “What is a SmartNIC” from July 2017, which has been read over 6,000 times. This year, for the second time, I’ve presented at the Storage Developer Conference (SDC). The title for this blog post was also the title of my breakout session video, which ran for 50 minutes, and went live earlier this week. Here is the abstract for that session:
Since the advent of the Smart Phone over a decade ago, we’ve seen several new “Smart” technologies, but few have had a significant impact on the data center until now. SmartNICs and SmartSSDs will change the landscape of the data center, but what comes next? This talk will summarize the state of the SmartNIC market by classifying and discussing the technologies behind the leading products in the space. Then it will dive into the emerging technology of SmartSSDs and how they will change the face of storage and solutions. Finally, we’ll dive headfirst into the impact of PCIe 5 and Compute Express Link (CXL) on the future of Smart Acceleration on solution delivery.
—Scott Schweitzer, The Technology Evangelist, Xilinx, Sept 2020
In that talk, which has been seen by over 100 people in just the first 24-hours alone on YouTube (I’m told this doesn’t include conference attendees), I shared much of what I’ve learned over the past few months while producing the following new items on SmartNICs:
- My fourth Electronic Design (ED) article on September 13th is titled “How PCIe 5 with CXL, CCIX, and SmartNICs Will Change Solution Acceleration.” This piece touches on some of the new high-level protocols which will make Smart Accelerators even more performant.
- Hosting an IEEE Hot Interconnects Panel on August 19th titled: “SmartNICs vs. DPUs, Who Wins?” Over 225 people originally attended this talk, and the video has since been viewed another 300 times. We were fortunate enough to secure critical people from all the major SmartNIC companies, except Intel, for an extremely lively discussion. I also did a blog post on this last month.
- The third article for ED on SmartNICs published on July 10th with the title “SmartNIC Architectures: A Shift to Accelerators and Why FPGAs are Poised to Dominate.” This article offers up a pretty comprehensive overview of the technologies in the market today from the leading companies.
- The second article for ED on June 29th, “Why is a SmartNIC Better than a Regular NIC?“
- My first article for ED on June 4th, “What Makes a SmartNIC Smart?“
And there’s more to come…