Intel Architecture Day 2021 & The Linux State

Intel Architecture Day 2021 also provided the latest look at their work around the IPU - the Infrastructure Processing Unit - for offloading more logic to this new dedicated controller in order to free CPU resources. Intel's hope with the IPU is for running Cloud Service Provider (CSP) infrastructure code on it to allow more CPU resources to be dedicated to hypervisors and other client code as well as maintaining the root of trust.

IPU usage should also lead to lower latency and less jitter.

Intel announced Oak Springs Canyon as a product for cloud providers with network and storage acceleration. Oak Spring Canyons is built around an Agilex FPGA and Xeon D SoC.

Another new announcement is Intel N6000 Arrow Creek as an acceleration development platform (ADP) around 100G networking to handle custom packet processing and other tasks. Arrow Creek leverages an Agilex FPGA and E810 network controller.

Rounding out the cloud/infrastructure announcements was Mount Evans as Intel's 200G IPU. Mount Evans makes use of up to 16 Arm Neoverse N1 CPU cores.

The Linux bring-up for these various infrastructure offerings are ongoing.