Intel sees IPU helping companies leverage resources with secure, programmable, stable solution – Times of India

At the recent Six Five Summit, Intel unveiled its vision for the infrastructure processing unit (IPU), a programmable networking device designed to enable cloud and communication service providers to reduce overhead and free up performance for central processing units (CPUs). The IPU is a programmable network device that intelligently manages system-level infrastructure resources by securely accelerating those functions in a data center. It allows cloud operators to shift to a fully virtualized storage and network architecture while maintaining high performance and predictability, as well as a high degree of control.
It has dedicated functionality to accelerate modern applications that are built using a microservice-based architecture in the data center. Research from Google and Facebook has shown 22% to 80% of CPU cycles can be consumed by microservices communication overhead.
With the IPU, a cloud provider can securely manage infrastructure functions while enabling its customer to entirely control the functions of the CPU and system memory.
Intel will roll out additional FPGA-based IPU platforms and dedicated ASICs. These solutions will be enabled by a powerful software foundation that allows customers to build leading-edge cloud orchestration software.
Evolving data centers will require a new intelligent architecture where large-scale distributed heterogeneous compute systems work together and is connected seamlessly to appear as a single compute platform. This new architecture will help resolve today’s challenges of stranded resources, congested data flows and incompatible platform security. This intelligent data center architecture will have three categories of compute — CPU for general-purpose compute, XPU for application-specific or workload-specific acceleration, and IPU for infrastructure acceleration — that will be connected through programmable networks to efficiently utilize data center resources.