At FMS 2022, MaxLinear, made one of the strangest claims: that it had a new DPU. The DPU or Data Processing Unit has generally become a network device that falls between a SmartNIC and an exotic FPGA solution. The MaxLinear Panther III was advertised as a “DPU” either as an assault on the intellectual prowess of conference attendees or the company’s investors. Since the term “DPU” has largely become an industry-accepted term, it was the equivalent of a manufacturer selling announcing it has a new “GPU” product even though it actually has a “SSD”.
This is the MaxLinear Panther III Fake DPU shown at FMS 2022. The basic concept is that it accelerates cryptographic and compression workloads. I asked the company point blank a number of questions to see if it had attributes aligned to a DPU, and their answers confirmed that it did not. It sounded like the company was calling this a DPU just to have folks come to say it was not. To be clear, the displays at the event clearly said that the product was a “DPU”, even though it is not.
For those in the industry that were unsure of where a device falls on the spectrum, we made a quick “What is a DPU?” guide and video:
At the time, we took what the industry players, including manufacturers and customers, were used to define DPUs, and distilled it into a set of criteria. In 2020, there was still some confusion about where a SmartNIC ended and where a DPU started on the spectrum.
The...
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