Yup, AMD's Elba And Giglio Definitely Sound Like They Work Corporate Security

Cisco is cramming into more of its switches Pensando data processing units (DPUs) from AMD, which will be dedicated to handling security, storage, and other tasks.

Unveiled at Cisco Live Amsterdam on Tuesday, these latest DPU-infused "smart switches" join Switchzilla's existing Nexus 9300 family of appliances.

At the heart of the equipment is an all-new in-house ASIC from Cisco's Silicon One family called the E100 that'll provide up to 4.8 Tbps of network capacity. That bandwidth will be divvied up across your choice of either 24 x 100 Gbps ports or a top-of-rack (ToR) appliance with 48 x 25 Gbps ports, two 100 Gbps, and six 400 Gbps ports.

However, the switches' real party trick is the inclusion of those Pensando DPUs that, as their name suggests, are designed to offload data-intensive networking, security, or storage workloads from the rest of the appliance.

Traditionally, when we've talked about DPUs, we were referring to SmartNIC-type devices, such as Nvidia's BlueField or Marvell's Octeon family of network add-in cards. And while AMD also offers its Pensando DPUs in this form factor – an add-on card you and I can buy for servers and similar machines – its P4 processing engines can also be included in switches sold by the likes of Cisco.

One notable benefit to this approach of putting DPUs into switches is that data processing can be handled by the ToR box rather than requiring individual connected systems to be equipped with a pricey DPU card of their own.

In the case of Cisco's N9300 smart switches, its E100 switch ASIC will handle the bulk of the networking duty, while security and other services are offloaded to the included DPU.

Unfortunately, we aren't getting Pensando's latest and greatest Salina DPUs announced during AMD's Advancing AI event last October. Instead, Cisco tells us the 24-port Nexus 9324C will feature Pensando's older Elba generation of DPUs, which features 2 x 200 Gbps Ethernet interfaces, 144 match processing units, 16 Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, and dedicated encryption and storage offload engines.

The larger 56-port ToR switch, meanwhile, features a nearly identical DPU called Giglio which offers the same bandwidth capacity, and match unit and CPU core count, but has been optimized for lower power.

Cisco's Hypershield security platform will be among the first services embedded on its DPU-packed N9300 switches. Announced last year, Hypershield is Cisco's take on a hyperscale distributed security service that is designed to run across its portfolio of switches and servers, rather than relying on dedicated firewalls or load balancers to handle the job.

However, it should be noted that Pensando's DPUs are by no means limited to accelerating security workloads thanks to their P4 programmability. Cisco says its switches will be able to host and accelerate multiple services.

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Cisco's 24-port N9300 switches are expected to begin shipping this (Northern Hemisphere) spring, while its larger 56-port ToR switch is slated for release this summer.

While these switches are the latest to integrate Pensando's P4 processing engines, they're by no means the first. Cisco and AMD previously teased [PDF] the 8102-28FH-DPU-O which paired a 12.8 Tbps Silicon One Q200L switch ASIC with up to 1.6 Tbps of data processing capacity by way of eight 200 Gbps Elba DPUs.

Prior to AMD's acquisition of the networking startup in 2022, Pensando partnered with Cisco-rival HPE to bake its P4 engines into select switches from Aruba. ®