Marvell announces some very smart SmartNIC processors
Marvell has begun to sample the Octeon 10, a server microprocessor aimed at intelligent network management that has up to 24 Arm-compatible cores, making it as powerful as any server processor.
Marvell refers to the Octeon processor line as data processing units (DPUs). They are designed to run high-throughput data in the cloud and on-premises. The DPU is more commonly called the SmartNIC because it can offload non-computational tasks from the CPU like network packet processing, data encryption and compression. That frees up CPU cores to run general-purpose applications.
The Octeon 10 has a few firsts. It's the first processor made by TSMCs 5nm manufacturing process and the first processor to feature Arm’s Neoverse N2 core. The N2 core uses the new Armv9 architecture that the company claims can deliver 40% more single-threaded performance for a variety of workloads vs. the N1, but still retains the same level of power and area efficiency as N1.