AMD Expands Data Center Solutions Capabilities with Acquisition of Pensando - $1.9B

[Dark Kaeser]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.

04/04/2022

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pensando for approximately $1.9 billion before working capital and other adjustments. Pensando’s distributed services platform includes a high-performance, fully programmable packet processor and comprehensive software stack that accelerate networking, security, storage and other services for cloud, enterprise and edge applications.

“To build a leading-edge data center with the best performance, security, flexibility and lowest total cost of ownership requires a wide range of compute engines,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. “All major cloud and OEM customers have adopted EPYC processors to power their data center offerings. Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio. The Pensando team brings world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at the chip, software and platform level which expands our ability to offer leadership solutions for our cloud, enterprise and edge customers.”

“We are excited to join the AMD family. Our shared cultures of innovation, excellence and relentless focus on partners and customers make this an ideal combination. Together, we have the talent and tools to deliver on our customers’ vision for the future of computing,” said Pensando CEO Prem Jain. “In less than five years Pensando has assembled a best-in-class engineering team that are experts in building systems together with a rich, deep ecosystem of partners and customers who have currently deployed over 100,000 Pensando platforms into production. Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our core business and enable us to pursue a much larger customer base across more markets.”

CEO Prem Jain and the Pensando team will join AMD as part of the Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Forrest Norrod. Pensando will remain focused on executing their product and technology roadmaps, now with additional scale to accelerate their business and address growing market opportunities across a broader number of customers.

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022, following satisfaction of customary closing conditions including approval under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976.

https://www.amd.com/en/press-releas...r-solutions-capabilities-acquisition-pensando

AMD Acquires Pensando for its DPU Future​

What is Pensando?​

Pensando’s physical products are called its “Distributed Services Card”. This card basically marries a high-speed network interface, with a P4 programmable pipeline engine, an Arm CPU complex, memory controllers, accelerators for cryptography, storage, and more, and also PCIe Gen4. All of these features go onto a PCIe card.

The key here is that the way Pensando’s solution works is by managing traffic more similarly to how it would be managed in a switch in a P4 pipeline. Customers or software providers can utilize the pipeline and then build additional acceleration on certain parts of the pipeline.

While some may see Arm cores and immediately compare them to Intel Mount Evans, NVIDIA BlueField-2 (and newer) DPUs, Marvell Octeon 10 DPUs, in Pensando’s architecture, the main point is the P4 pipeline, not the Arm cores. If P4 sounds familiar in the DPU world, Intel has a number of IPUs, and the Mt. Evans product that is really focused on Google’s cloud at the moment features a P4-based toolchain.

Pensando has been investing in a software stack and APIs to basically re-create a lot of what Nitro does for AWS. Pensando then lets customers choose what it wants to use. For example, NetApp ships some systems with Pensando DPUs, and those systems are using the cards just for the accelerator offloads and networking.

Why AMD is Buying Pensando​

The next question is, why Pensando, not someone else? To me, there are basically two DPU startups left that seem to have some scale that it would make sense for AMD. Pensando is one, Fungible is the other. While Pensando is using P4 and Arm to build something “AWS Nitro-like”, Fungible started with a storage product.

Xilinx is for certain classes of devices and IP blocks (think chiplets with UCIe) for the data center and the embedded market. AMD needs AI acceleration hardware as it is trailing NVIDIA and Intel in that category. It also needed a DPU to bolster networking since Intel and NVIDIA are both actively pushing that line. Xilinx perhaps could have been the answer, but in the end, it was faster to purchase Pensando and de-risk getting a product by buying the best available independent DPU maker out there.

The AMD-Xilinx deal taking so long probably made it so that the Xilinx/ SolarFlare IP was probably not going to be the right option, and so AMD needed a solution and Pensando is the company that probably had the best fit.

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ac...ipu-nvidia-bluefield-marvell-octeon-fungible/

 

[muddymind]

High-octane patrick never disappoints

 

[Dark Kaeser]

AMD CEO Lisa Su breaks down acquisition of cloud startup Pensando for $1.9 billion​

AMD Makes A Big DPU Move With $1.9 Billion Bid For Pensando​

Now AMD is about to take the final step to complete is this expanding family of datacenter offerings, announcing Monday plans to buy Pensando and its programmable packet processor and distributed services platform for about $1.9 billion. The move will give the chip maker a platform that is being used by cloud players like Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud, vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ Aruba Networks Business and larger enterprises like Goldman Sachs.

“With Pensando, we’re augmenting those other three pillars with a unique packet-processing and distributed-services platform that allows us to accelerate not just networking but security to accelerate storage applications, to add new capabilities to trace activity in the datacenter for threat detection and performance optimization and to do it all simultaneously,” Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Datacenter Solutions Group, tells The Next Platform. “We think we’re completing the puzzle. We’ve got a complete complement now of those CPU-, GPU-, FPGA-based acceleration and adaptable SoCs and then finally, this piece that helps us knit it all together in a secure, highly performant fashion that we think is going to be core to continuing to allow our customers to scale, to do it securely and to do it efficiently by offloading a lot of infrastructure [tasks] that otherwise would be consuming CPU or other cycles.”

The programmability and SmartNIC capabilities of Pensando’s platform strike a similar chord to what Xilinx offers. Norrod notes Xilinx SmartCards, saying they’ve been adopted by some of AMD’s larger enterprise customer. However, he says, the approaches taken by each company are different.

“Both solutions have a set of hard-coded accelerators for very common features,” he says. “The difference is, for anything else, with Pensando, we’ve got a programmable, highly customizable P4 packet processor that can do many, many things and can be easily programmed in software to do those many things. Xilinx has very high performance and, in Xilinx, you can do a lot of that and you can actually do it at even higher performance, but you have to program the FPGA. The way that we look at this is, for the ultimate in performance for a narrow set of functions, we can address that with the Xilinx technology and offer the pinnacle of performance for certain classes of workloads and certain customers.”

https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/04/04/amd-makes-a-big-dpu-move-with-1-9-billion-bid-for-pensando/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

AMD: Pensando gives us better-than-AWS networking tech to rule the cloud​

"The value that candidly AWS has shown with Nitro and offloading that stuff and standardizing platform interfaces underneath was pretty evident," said Forrest Norrod, the head of AMD's Data Center Solutions Business Group. "Pensando was very interesting as we were looking at it in that I really believe they're two to three years ahead of anybody else in the industry."

"Pensando offers essentially software programmability that [provides] a great deal of flexibility, and they provide great performance across a wide range of simultaneous workloads or simultaneous data flows," he said.

"But with Alveo, we can hit absolute maximum performance with essentially hardware implementation of that whole pipeline, albeit at the cost of FPGA programming and probably with less simultaneous features supported or less simultaneous flows supported."

So rather than making the Pensando and Alveo teams compete for the same business, Norrod said, he sees the two technologies as complimentary and key to building "the best possible networking technology franchise." To support this view, the executive cited an unnamed company that is using both Pensando and Alveo technologies concurrently.

"They have a very clean view of where one fits and the other fits, so we think doing this gives us the broadest possible range to address any requirement in this market," he said.

AMD may build chiplet designs using Pensando and other silicon​

One of the more intriguing takeaways from our interview is that AMD is likely looking to integrate Pensando's chips onto silicon with other chip technologies in its portfolio.

Norrod said AMD is "absolutely" exploring the possibilities of combining Pensando with the company's other chip technologies as he sees Pensando as "applicable in a lot of places."

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/amd_pensando_aws/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Negócio concluído.

AMD Expands Data Center Solutions Capabilities with Acquisition of Pensando​

AMD today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Pensando Systems in a transaction valued at approximately $1.9 billion.

https://www.amd.com/en/press-releas...r-solutions-capabilities-acquisition-pensando

 

[Nemesis11]

Espero que a AMD não se esteja a espalhar para demasiados mercados, para a sua dimensão. Ainda por cima, este mercado de DPUs está bastante no inicio.

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Tendo em conta o valor, e dado que é uma solução que está a ser avaliada por alguns players da Cloud, parece-me um bom negócio.

A AMD tem começado a ver o retorno do mercado de servidores com os Epyc, ainda falta começar a ter retorno com as GPU de servidores (Instinct) possivelmente só daqui a 2 anos, mas a concorrência em alguns campos já ia à frente.

Relativamente aos concorrentes directos faltava: solução redes/networking, interconnect para HPC

A aquisição da Xilinx abriu-lhe essas portas, trazendo ainda FPGA. A AMD creio que iria usar uma solução para este mercado dos DPU/IPU desenvolvida pela XIlinx como diz o Norrod mais acima, mas os concorrentes já têm uma solução e a Amazon até desenvolveu a sua própria solução.

Isto só faz sentido numa estratégia mais vasta de aposta em conquistar mais mercado nos servidores ou pelo menos não perder para os concorrentes por não conseguir oferecer soluções próprias. (A Nvidia neste momento é uma boa cliente dos Epyc ).

E diria que a solução encontrada para a aquisição da XIlinx deixou €$paço para mais aquisições de empresas que ainda estejam no estado de "start-ups".

 

[Dark Kaeser]

AMD Pensando Giglio DPU for 2023 Salina DPU in 2024 and AMD EPYC​

As part of AMD’s VMware Explore 2022 presentation, the company released new details on its Pensando roadmap that we had not covered previously. The AMD Giglio DPU is slated for 2023. In 2024 the Salina DPU is expected on 5nm. The company also showed its current products and showed AMD EPYC integration plans.

Now part of AMD, we get more details on the Elba DPUs. An example is this DSC2-25G, the dual 25GbE part.

There is also a DSC2-100G. This is the dual QSFP28 card for 2x 100GbE.

We have NVIDIA BlueField-2 versions of both the above, but Pensando’s hardware availability has been more challenged. Hopefully under AMD that availability expands.

What AMD showed, however, was a roadmap for its DPUs. The AMD Pensando Giglio is named after an Italian island and is a Gen 2+ part. We asked AMD about this and this is a cost optimization update to the Elba generation that is slated for 2023.

AMD also noted that it is going into more segments with its IP. The one that should not be a surprise is “AMD EPYC Solutions (Future)” under Enterprise DPUs. We cannot wait to see how this integration happens.

Final Words​

AMD Pensando now has names for the next generations with the Giglio and Salina. It also has a pathway to 800G solutions in the 2024 timeframe. This is important since both Intel and NVIDIA have shared their plans to hit a similar generational timeline.

Our biggest hope is that the AMD acquisition helps get more of these cards out in the market. Intel has many different efforts under its IPU umbrella, many we have seen hands-on. NVIDIA may not have as high-performance of architecture with its BlueField-2 DPU, but those cards are available enough that we have dozens in the lab. We actually stopped purchasing 100GbE NICs and standardized on BlueField-2 DPUs, and part of that was the ease of use. Our hope is that as AMD Pensando gets its hardware roadmap rolling, AMD also gets its user/ developer experience to be as easy as NVIDIA.

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-pensando-giglio-dpu-for-2023-salina-dpu-in-2024-and-amd-epyc/