A year ago, AMD plunked down $1.9 billion to acquire privately held data processing unit (DPU) vendor Pensando. A year later, what has AMD been doing with Pensando and is the big bet paying off?
To answer that question SDxCentral talked to Soni Jiandani, who currently serves as the corporate vice president of the Networking Solutions Group at AMD. Jiandani was part of the team of ex-Cisco employees that started Pensando in 2019. She noted that over the past year, the Pensando business unit within AMD has grown, advancing the way that DPU technology can be integrated into smart switches and infrastructure acceleration systems. A DPU is a purpose-built piece of silicon technology that is designed for network data traffic. The basic idea is that by offloading data traffic to a DPU, compute intensive tasks can be optimized on CPU and GPU resources.
“If you look at the journey that AMD is on in the data center, it’s really to look at how to go about building the industry’s highest performing adaptive computing portfolio,”Jiandani said. “I think DPUs are the most efficient way to deal with things that need to have data processing at the edge.”