If you ignore any marketing, this NVIDIA doc is a good read: https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-resource-library/n...
Wasting energy on another mailing list post to reduce energy (and time) waste from following the b0rked pointer:
https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-resource-library/n...
Nice find, thanks for sharing, Jamal!
An interesting observation is that specialized silicon (here, the DPUs) generate significant savings (only) when the system is under high load. The devil's advocate would argue that most real-world systems spend most of their life in lower-load regimes, and that for such systems, the energy savings under high load must be traded off against the base overhead of keeping the special-purpose silicon "lit" even during the (probably dominant) lower-load times.
In particular, the white paper has some cost savings projections (tables 1 - 3) - which is nice - from power saved by DPUs over three years for different applications, but the assumption there seems to be that the servers are 100% utilized over all of these three years, which seems quite contrived, at the very least for the telco workloads.
So for workloads with typical time-of-day/seasonal variations, where you have to provision for maximum load, the savings might be significantly lower in practice - CPU frequency scaling seems to do a nice job at low utilization levels today. It may be hard to justify the investment in (and presumable increase in base power consumption of) DPUs.
That said, some applications are different (crypto mining comes to mind), and in some places the energy costs are/will be much higher than the USD 0.15/kWh. But still :-)