AMD shows why it spent big on Pensando last year with a collection of customers praising it. We are also seeing a tip of the veil for the next generation.

AMD is unveiling a portfolio of network accelerators under the AMD Pensando brand at its data center and AI technology premiere in San Francisco, USA. AMD bought Pensando, a company specializing in DPUs, for $1.9 billion last year.

Today, AMD catapults many big names onto the podium. They will tell you how to do it one by one AMD Pensando has improved their lives and their data center. Granted, the numbers are pretty good. For example, we hear from DXC Technology that the introduction of Aruba’s CX 10000 switch with Pensando DPU on board results in a savings of €65 million. Gerald Gedrace, Principal Group TPM Manager at Microsoft Azure, says that if you can migrate even one service from the server to the DPU, the Pensando DPUs pay for themselves.

So good news that AMD continues to rely on Pensando. The company’s goal is to innovate every two years to stay a generation ahead of the competition. AMD therefore plans to launch the next generation of Pensando chips by the end of 2023. It will be codenamed Giglio and will need to offer more horsepower and be less power hungry.

SSDK for developers

At its core, the AMD Pensando DPU is an ASIC. The on-chip P4 components are programmable. This enables companies to optimize the DPU for numerous tasks. For example, you can run a virtual firewall, load balancer, or hypervisor directly on the DPU.

To make a big impact there, developers need to be on board. That’s why AMD today announced the Pensando Software-in-Silicon Developer Kit (SSDK). Several major customers are already using this option today.