The time for BlueField has come.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, Nvidia on BlueField Data Processing Unit
Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference(GTC) 2020 featured a new, first-of-its-kind chip that went by the name BlueField Data Processing Unit or BlueField DPU. It was the world’s first data centre infrastructure on a chip designed specifically for enterprise cloud workloads and high-performance computing. It had the power to transform the entire IT infrastructure of organizations by offloading and accelerating networking, storage and security.
Fast forward to GTC 2021, this year NVIDIA unveiled its new generation chips of the BlueField DPU family. This includes the BlueField-3 which will be coming next year in 2022 and BlueField-4, which is expected to be released in 2024. BlueField-3 carries forward the legacy of BlueField-2. It will have over 10 times the processing capability of BlueField-2. Moreover, it will have over 22 billion transistors, 16 ARM CPU cores and is the first chip ever to have a networking speed of 400 Gbps. BlueField-4 is expected to improve the processing capability of BlueField-3 by another 10 times. This would lead to a total of 100 times increase in the processing capability in 3 years. Furthermore, BlueField-4 will feature 64 billion transistors and will have a networking speed of 800Gbps, which will be twice that of BlueField-3.
We are on a pace to introduce a new BlueField generation every 18 months.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, Nvidia
Nvidia’s BlueField DPU has enormous applications in high-performance computing on the cloud. The potential for BlueField DPU is so huge that one of the early adopters of Nvidia’s BlueField is going to be Nvidia itself. During GTC 2021, Jensen Huang, the Founder and CEO of Nvidia, announced that Nvidia is going to move GeForce Now to BlueField.
We are transitioning GeForce Now to BlueField.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, Nvidia
GeForce Now is Nvidia’s gaming service in the cloud that makes use of Nvidia GeForce GPUs. GeForce Now has over 10 million users from over 70 countries since its inception a little over a year ago. To deliver quality service to an ever-increasing number of users, Nvidia is moving GeForce Now to BlueField DPU.
With BlueField we can isolate the infrastructure from the game instances, and offload and accelerate the Networking, Storage and Security. The GeForce Now infrastructure is costly. With BlueField we will improve our quality of service and concurrent users at the same time. The ROI of BlueField is excellent.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, Nvidia
The importance of BlueField DPU was stressed by Jensen Huang by mentioning that about a third of the 30 million data centres shipped worldwide each year are used for running the software-defined data centre stack. The increase in the workload for running these software-defined data centre stack is increasing faster than Moore’s law. Hence, unless there is an increase in the offloading and accelerating of the workload related to running of software-defined data centre stack, there are going to be fewer and fewer CPUs to run the applications. This offloading and accelerating of software-defined data-centre-stack workload is one of the breakthroughs that BlueField DPU achieves.
A simple way to think about this is that one-third of the roughly 30 million data centre servers shipped each year are consumed running the software-defined data centre stack. This workload is increasing much faster than Moore’s law. So unless we offload and accelerate this workload, data centres will have fewer and fewer CPUs to run applications. The time for BlueField has come.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, Nvidia
Watch the GTC 2021 Keynote session on Youtube, here.