Dubbed Mt Evans, this new DPU uses Arm cores and provides hardware offloads for storage, networking, and security.

The official designation is Intel E2100-CCQDA2. It features two ports that can be set up as either 1x 200GbE or 2x 100GbE, and it also accommodates a division into 4x 25GbE. Additionally, the card includes a 1GbE out-of-band management port.

Onboard, are 16 Arm Neoverse N1 cores with a 32MB cache and three channels of 16GB LPDDR4x memory, totalling 48GB.

The ambition behind the Mt Evans IPU was to engineer a DPU comparable to an AWS Nitro solution for Google Cloud. This entails offloading tasks such as NVMe over Fabric and fortifying the network with Intel QuickAssist derived IP. The Intel IPU E2100 represents the inaugural public iteration of the series for clientele beyond Google.

Chipzilla concentrated its support for the card on Google, but is now extending that support to a broader market.

Intel showcased capabilities such as deep packet inspection, OpenVINO with NGINX Plus AI, and even Red Hat OpenShift applications for the IPU. We are hopeful to acquire a couple of these units shortly as we are currently evaluating the BlueField-3 DPUs.