Recently, China Mobile, a domestic "cloud giant", has also brought its own DPU chip "Panshi" - the first local 400Gbps bandwidth DPU ASIC chip, achieving independent and controllable key technologies. Considering the importance of DPU for data centers and cloud services, it is believed that this will lay a solid foundation for China Mobile, which has vigorously developed cloud services in recent years, and bring it unique competitiveness.
The so-called DPU (Data Processing Unit) refers to a data processing unit. As the name suggests, this is a chip specifically designed for data processing. As the third main chip after CPU and GPU, DPU has become the focus of almost all cloud manufacturers and even overseas chip giants. For example, Nvidia spent $6.9 billion to acquire Mellanox, and AMD spent $1.9 billion to acquire Pensando, all for DPU.
The DPU white paper "Cloud Computing Universal Programmable DPU Development White Paper (2023)" jointly written by China Mobile's Collaborative Cloud Leopard Intelligence and the Institute of Information and Communications Technology points out that as human productivity enters the computing power era, traditional CPU based architectures are facing computing power bottlenecks. Diversified computing power demands urgently require comprehensive changes in software and hardware architectures. The development of computing power technology will follow the concept of "software defines everything, hardware accelerates everything", reconstruct computing power infrastructure, and the Universal Programmable Acceleration Unit (DPU) will become the new computing power core, redefine new standards for cloud computing technology in the computing power era, and construct a new technology curve for the computing power era.
From the perspective of product application, how can one be called a DPU with competitive advantages?
In our opinion, it should first be able to support high-speed and low latency networks, as this is the primary task of this chip; Secondly, we also hope that this DPU can introduce high-performance general-purpose multi-core CPUs and programmable hardware accelerators, in order to provide programmability and universal processing capabilities while also meeting the execution of differentiated specific tasks such as artificial intelligence, analysis, and security operations.
The bandwidth of China Mobile's chip is 400Gbps, which closely meets the current high bandwidth requirements of data centers. We can confidently say that the successful development of China Mobile's "Panshi" DPU chip is a major technological breakthrough in China's domestic chip field.
Familiar readers should be well aware that the integration of data center servers is increasing. The CPU chips of servers with architectures such as x86 and Arm are integrating hundreds or even more CPUs into a single chip, and the density is constantly increasing; At the same time, network storage is also developing towards elastic storage based on low latency Ethernet technology, which increases the demand for high bandwidth and low latency Ethernet; Furthermore, the increase in private cloud applications and virtual desktop infrastructure has placed additional demands on the network; Finally, the accumulation of massive data on the Internet of Things and edges is increasing the bandwidth requirements for networks.
The new demand brought by AI has surged to 400Gbps, which also makes the release of Panshi DPU timely. It is reported that the launch of Panshi DPU not only elevates the maximum transmission speed of domestic DPU chips to a new level, but also outshines another domestic operator's DPU based on overseas FPGA+CPU multi chip solutions.
It is worth mentioning that with the introduction of this chip, domestic DPUs have also evolved to the world's top level for the first time - the bandwidth of this chip is at the same level as the globally leading Nvidia BlueField-3 DPU.
According to public information, the Panshi DPU chip has a data transmission capacity of 400Gbps, doubling the maximum transmission speed of domestic DPU chips and reaching the world's top level. The chip has the storage capacity to process millions of data packets per second, and the latency for Remote Direct Access to Data (RDMA) is as low as 5 microseconds. At the same time, it also has the characteristics of low power consumption and low cost. The Panshi DPU hardware board built on this chip reduces power consumption by 50% and cost by 50% compared to the previous generation hardware board. After China Mobile launches the "Panshi" DPU chip, it will undoubtedly bring huge profits to its cloud services and higher cost-effective product solutions for its customers, which will also bring greater pressure to other cloud service providers in China.
We believe that the "Panshi" DPU chip will effectively promote the independent and controllable development of key DPU technologies, continuous optimization of hardware architecture, and continuous improvement of ecological layout in China. At the press conference, China Mobile further pointed out that the chip will be widely used in the construction of China Mobile's data center, support general computing, intelligent computing and other business scenarios, provide more secure, reliable and efficient technical support for cloud computing, edge computing, big data processing, AI big model training and other fields, and help China's big data, artificial intelligence, and computing networks develop at a high speed.
As is well known, building a DPU ASIC is not an easy task, which is why most manufacturers build related solutions based on FPGA. From the current perspective, compared with ASIC solutions, FPGA based multi chip solutions have high power consumption, high cost, high R&D requirements for users, high manpower investment, and cannot flexibly port various applications. More importantly, the high-performance FPGA chips and accompanying CPU chips used in these solutions are provided by overseas manufacturers.
This makes the 400Gbps domestically produced DPU chip developed by China Mobile's collaborative ecosystem partners more meaningful in the country's strategy of vigorously developing new quality productivity.
As a leading domestic operator, China Mobile has frequently invested in chip self-development through its subsidiaries in the past few years.
For example, in June 2023, China Mobile's subsidiary, China Mobile IoT, officially released the world's first RISC-V architecture LTE-Cat. 1 chip (CM8610 LTE-Cat. 1 chip) and China Mobile's first mass-produced cellular IoT communication chip (CM6620 NB IoT chip). In August of that year, China Mobile also released a core independent innovation achievement, the "Breaking Wind 8676" reconfigurable 5G RF transceiver chip. According to China Mobile's description, these chips not only improve the performance of the company's products, but also contribute to the domestic independent controllable business.
After the launch of "Panshi" DPU, China Mobile's self-developed chip business has taken it to a new level. Looking forward to them bringing us more surprises in the future.