AMD Completes Pensando Acquisition For Adding DPUs To Their Portfolio

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Completes Pensando Acquisition For Adding DPUs To Their Portfolio

It was just last month that AMD announced plans to acquire Pensando and today that $1.9 billion deal has been completed...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Pensando-Complete

[ms178]

With FPGAs and now DPUs, I wonder how they will integrate all of these different compute engines in their software stack. I hear AMD people shouting "ROCm" loud and clear already, but as far as I know that stack still lacks support for different OS platforms and even different GPU generations. There was talk of such a unified platform back at SC 2020, but I haven't heard anything new on that front since then, especially how that would work on Windows (via WSL2?)...

[Mahboi]

We feared that Nvidia taking over ARM would make them a monster on all processing, and now, AMD is slowly building its way into being tentacular in how complete their portfolio is.
FPGAs (Xilinx) on GPUs and CPUs, DPUs for clouds now? Even just with AM5 they're, as far as I can see, the only owner of the full MB/CPU/GPU toolchain right now. Intel might follow but their ARC will take years yet before it's competitive. So AMD can have complete home PC control and wants to own Cloud just as completely.

[Eumaios]

We feared that Nvidia taking over ARM would make them a monster on all processing, and now, AMD is slowly building its way into being tentacular in how complete their portfolio is.

I don't see the problem. There's a big difference between one competitor in a competitive market taking over a major source of supply (NVIDIA/ARM) (and thus making the market far less competitive) versus one company developing an ability to compete in numerous competitive markets (AMD adding DPUs).

[phoron]

Is it just me needing to wake up and smell the coffee or is DPU the worst name one could choose ? Data processing unit ? What do CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and even VPUs process then ? It's all data ! I know I can look it up, but the name itself tells me nothing of what the part does.

[ms178]

Is it just me needing to wake up and smell the coffee or is DPU the worst name one could choose ? Data processing unit ? What do CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and even VPUs process then ? It's all data ! I know I can look it up, but the name itself tells me nothing of what the part does.

That's why Intel calls them IPU, Infrastructure Processing Units. Patrick from ServeTheHome had a nice video about the terminology some time last year.

Mahboi AMD is only catching up, Intel already has all of the needed know-how in-house thanks to past acquisitions and Nvidia also cooks up combined data center solutions. The funny thing is that their ConnectX SmartNICs were using Xilinx FPGAs under the hood, they will want to develop something themselves to not be reliant on AMD in the future.

[Mahboi]

I don't see the problem. There's a big difference between one competitor in a competitive market taking over a major source of supply (NVIDIA/ARM) (and thus making the market far less competitive) versus one company developing an ability to compete in numerous competitive markets (AMD adding DPUs).

It's not a problem, I'm just noting that the Giant is becoming Gianter.

Be weary of extreme success. Lisa Su has proven to be an incredible asset to the growth of tech, but she isn't eternal. If one day AMD gets turned into some investors-and-stock-is-everything company and away from tech, all this power will be turned into a narrow-minded and worthless waste of a company. It's happened before.

Let's just remain cautiously optimistic about AMD's power and its consequences.