Xsight Labs E1 DPU a 64-Core Arm Neoverse N2 800G DPU

Summary

Xsight Labs E1 HeatSink 6 Today we have a fun one. A few months ago, I was at Xsight Labs in California and saw the company’s E1 DPU PCIe card. A few weeks after that, a 1U chassis arrived. We wanted to start our series with a quick look at the really neat DPU, as this is far different from the DPUs we covered a few years ago. If you have not heard of Xsight Labs, we first covered them in 2020, and their X2 switch chip just had a major milestone win, Powering SpaceX Starlink V3 networking. VIDEO If you want to see a few more angles, we have a short. The Xsight Labs E1 DPU Overview What Xsight Labs is building is not a NIC, or a NIC with a few compute cores attached. Instead, it is more of a miniature server. Xsight Labs E1 Front 2 The Xsight Labs E1 1U platform is much larger than the PCIe card, but that is really the point. The platform we are using is designed to not just be a network offload in a server. Instead, it is designed to be more flexible so that you can build more around the architecture. Xsight Labs OCP 2025 E1 PCIe DPU Card Starting with the E1 DPU, this is a 64-core Arm Neoverse N2 part built in TSMC 5nm, and you can stick four DDR5-5200 ECC RDIMMs alongside it in the 1RU server. Xsight Labs E1 HeatSink 1 Just to give you some sense, here is the block diagram for the part: XSight Labs E1 DPU Block Diagram Other than the DDR5 memory that we showed, there is a lot more going on. Our unit is still more of a development platform, which you can see from the USB headers. Still there is something neat. Xsight Labs E1 Rear 1 Onboard, there are two 400G MACs for a total of 800Gbps of networking. This platform is different because Xsight Labs has validated it with the SONiC-DASH Hero 800G test. That may not sound exciting, but SONiC is the open-source NOS right now running in many organizations. The Hero 800G test is one to validate that the NIC can keep 800Gbps of traffic moving with 120 million connections and 12 million connections per second with zero drop...