Intel’s smartNICs got a little smarter today with a new line of infrastructure processing units (IPU) at the Six Five Summit.

The IPU is Intel’s take on a data processing unit (DPU) and is a programmable networking device tasked with intelligently offloading data processing and communication tasks from the CPU, freeing up clock cycles traditionally consumed by input/output (I/O) overheads.

“The IPU is a new category of technologies and is one of the strategic pillars of our cloud strategy. It expands upon our smartNIC capabilities and is designed to address the complexity and inefficiencies in the modern data center,” Guido Appenzeller, CTO of Intel’s Data Platforms Group, said in a statement.

The company’s first FPGA-based IPUs are already being deployed in “multiple cloud service providers,” according to Patty Kummrow, Intel's VP of Data Platforms Group and GM of Ethernet Products Group. Meanwhile, Intel’s first ASIC-based IPUs have entered testing.

By deploying IPUs, Intel aims to address challenges associated with heterogeneous compute environments and cloud-native workloads, where the company claims up to 80% of a CPU may be consumed by I/O overheads. By shifting communications workloads off of the CPU and onto the IPU, Intel can free up those resources to run additional application instances, improving the overall efficiency of the data center.

“With the IPU, a cloud provider can securely manage infrastructure functions while enabling their customer to entirely control the functions of the CPU and system memory,” the company claims.

The premise behind Intel’s IPU is actually nothing new. In fact, Intel is a little late to the party. Mellanox’s BlueField DPUs, which Nvidia acquired with the purchase of the company in 2019, were announced nearly two years ago and released earlier this spring. BlueField-2 is designed to achieve similar functionality as Intel’s IPUs.

Nvidia’s third-generation BlueField DPUs, announced this spring, promise to offload up to 300 CPU cores worth of I/O tasks.

Likewise, data center startup Fungible is building an entire ecosystem around its DPUs and network cards. However, unlike BlueField, Fungible’s platform is built around a combination of specialized server hardware, software, and PCIe add-in cards, and operate over transmission control protocol (TCP) and Ethernet as opposed to technologies like non-volatile memory express (NVMe) over fabrics.

The move to these devices has implications for hyperscale and enterprise data centers alike as they enable companies to fully virtualize storage and network architectures while reducing CPU overheads.