The AMD 400-G Adaptive SmartNIC System on Chip: A Technology Preview
Jaideep Dastidar, David Riddoch, Jason Moore, Steven W. Pope, Jim Wesselkamper · IEEE Micro · 2023
This article presents the AMD 400-G Adaptive Smart Network Interface Card (SmartNIC) system on chip (SoC), a domain-specific architecture for offload acceleration of multitenant cloud network and storage applications. The article introduces the motivating factors behind SmartNIC and data processing unit accelerators in the datacenter. The article then describes how and why the adaptive SoC aims to strike a balance among software processing on embedded processors, fast-path application-specific integrated circuit-like processing on hardened logic, and adaptive and composable processing on an integrated field-programmable gate array. In architecting various subsystems of an SoC, the article describes how the device adapts to varying workloads over time through a dynamic function exchange of programmable logic (PL) and adapts to varying workloads over space by having different hardware execution pipelines executing alongside different PL binaries. The article also describes how security attestation and authentication, firewalls, and cryptographic acceleration permeate the device for a robust, multitenant confidential compute environment.