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back to article Mellanox NICs Xilinx FPGA to save backplane slots and CPU cycles

Mellanox's next-gen Innova network adapter won't just pack the obligatory high-speed interfaces – it'll also embed a Xilinx FPGA. Offloading workloads was already a key plank of Mellanox's adapter strategy, and that's apparently hit some buttons with customers – hence the FPGA. Senior director of marketing Bob Doud told The …

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  1. Bronek Kozicki

    Coherent interface and FPGA? That is very interesting. If I am not mistaken, "coherent" stands for memory access by the device, so assuming this thing works as implied I can imagine a card sending network updates directly into application data-processing loop. Or card reading the output queue (again directly from the application address space) and pushing it out over the network. Very nice thing, from the point of view of cutting application latency. Even if it only works on POWER architecture this way (which could use some USP anyway, and CAPI + NVLink seem like two such)

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  2. Ian Michael Gumby
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    Definitely cool...

    Can really be used to improve networking security.

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  3. Lorribot

    Infiniband storage?

    So apart from EMC Isilon that uses Infiniband on the backend, I have yet to come across anything that supports Infiniband direct to the server.

    It amazes me no one seems to be putting this in their HCI solution as back end vSAN replication or front ending their SSD arrays.

    Someone is using it as it is still around, can be real high end stuff, probably Node to node in big super computers.

    Anyone know?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Infiniband storage?

      Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance?

      Custom built distributed clusters are probably more widely used though.

      0 0 Reply
  4. razorfishsl

    it is NOT for bitcoin, FPGA's are useless for bitcoin now.

    It is for the commodity traders, consider a trading system directly inspecting the "bits" on the wire without having to travel up the full stack.

    you program up the FPGA with the trigger /response conditions via a back end, completely negates the CPU & software stack ,very very high speed trading friendly.

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