Xilinx today unveiled a SmartNIC aimed at helping cloud providers and private data centers address growing traffic demands.

The Alveo U25 SmartNIC is built on intellectual property acquired from the acquisition of SolarFlare last spring. The product pairs an ARM-based CPU with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) capable of 520,000 lookup tables. Connectivity is provided across two ports capable of 10 Gb/s to 25 Gb/s.

According to Xilinx, the smartNIC is designed to offload workloads like SDN, virtualized switching, NFV, NVMe over fabrics (NVME-oF), electronic trading, artificial intelligence (AI) inference, video transcoding, and data analytics, freeing up CPU cycles for other applications.

Xilinx is targeting tier-two and tier-three cloud service providers, telcos, and private cloud data center operators.

According to Sameer Shurpalekar, Alveo product line manager, Xilinx's data center traffic is growing at a rapid pace. And this poses a problem for cloud providers, who's servers now have to split time between managing traffic and running customer applications.

“As port speeds continue to grow exponentially and compute does not, this gap means over time you will eat up most of your CPU resources in the server and really won't have much to do any useful application processing,” he said.

The solution, according to Xilinx, is to shift the load off the CPU all together and on to a smartNIC. The company claims that while there are smartNICs on the market that offer faster connectivity, many of these require a significant amount of research and development to implement.

The Alveo U25 is designed to offer “plug-and-play” functionality with out-of-the-box support for Open vSwitch at launch.

“25 gig is the sweet spot with a lot of these tier-two and tier-three cloud providers and this is the first entry into the smartNIC space,” Shurpalekar said, adding that Xilinx has plans to offer higher-speed smartNICs in the future.

Xilinx claims the Alveo U25 will allow customers to offload up to 90% of Open vSwitch processing from the server for a 500% improvement in packet throughput.

The smartNIC is sampling to early customers as of today with general availability expected in the third quarter of this year.

Announced alongside the Alveo U25 is Xilinx's XtremeScale X2562 Ethernet adapter card, which is based on the OCP 3.0 form factor. Like the Alveo U25, the adapter is capable of 10 Gb/s to 25 Gb/s and is designed for use in high-performance electronic trading and enterprise data centers.

According to Shurpalekar, the new adapter is based on an existing PCI-express based adapter built under the SolarFlare moniker but offered in the OCP 3.0 form factor.

The XtremeScale X2562 is sampling as of today and is expected to reach the market in the second quarter.