Xilinx on Tuesday announced a new family of network interface cards (NIC) for data centers.
Alveo SN1000 is the industry’s first family of “composable” SmartNICs, the company said.
Based on the Xilinx 16nm UltraScale Plus architecture, the SN1000 family of SmartNICs are powered by the low-latency Xilinx XCU26 FPGA and a 16-core Arm processor.
SN1000 SmartNICs deliver dual-QSFP ports for 10/25/100Gb/s connectivity with leading small packet performance and a PCIe Gen 4 interconnect.
The first model in the family is the SN1022, which is offered in a full height, half length form factor in a 75W power envelope, the company said.
The SmartNICs has an open architecture and can directly offload CPU intensive tasks to optimize performance.
Software developers can use the cards to develop software-defined hardware acceleration applications. They can use high-level programming languages such as P4, C, and C++, to create network functions, protocols, and applications that operate in hardware on the SmartNIC.
Vitis Networking allows organizations to quickly and easily compose new, and tweak existing, network functions to handle new protocols and applications without replacing hardware, future proofing investments, Xilinx said.
The cards also support Open vSwitch and virtualization acceleration (Virtio.net). Security offloads include IPsec, kTLS and SSL/TLS and accelerated storage applications including Virtio.blk, NVMe over TCP, Ceph, and compression and crypto services.
Vitis development platform includes an accelerated algorithmic trading (AAT) reference design which gives software developers the ability to quickly and cost-effectively deliver sub-microsecond trading performance without the need for custom hardware development.
AAT, implemented on Alveo accelerator cards, provides a modular design, and each module be customized using C and C++ in the Vitis platform to meet each firm’s specific needs, the company said. AAT reference design is available for free to Alveo accelerator card customers.
The cards will be supplied in March. Xilinx also opened and app store for acceleration applications. Pre-built AI video analytics, anti-money laundering and live video transcoding applications are available.
