NVIDIA launched BlueField3 “Network Card” with support for 400Gbps and PCIe 5.0

At the GTC 2021 conference in the early hours of this morning, NVIDIA announced a number of blockbuster products, including a new generation of GPU roadmap, independent CPU “Grace”, the next generation of self-driving platform DRIVE Atlan and so on.

The products released at this conference are mainly for high-performance computing, CPU, GPU, AI chips are available, and another product is a DPU data processor. High-performance computing also requires a high-performance network architecture, so NVIDIA launched the BlueField3 network chip.

BlueField was originally developed by Mellanox, but NVIDIA spent $7 billion to incorporate the company. The BlueField series of chips have also become an important product of NVIDIA, and BlueField3 is a new generation of network accelerator chips.

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Although it is a “network card”, the scale of BlueField3 is much higher than that of ordinary chips. It integrates 22 billion transistors. The official process did not mention the specific process, but considering the scale and time to market, it should be a 5nm process.

BlueField3 integrates 16 Cortex-A78 cores, processing performance is 10 times that of BlueField2, can liberate more than 300 CPU cores, encryption performance is also more than 10 times that of BlueField2.

The network speed of BlueField3 can reach 400Gbps, and BlueField3 also supports PCIe 5.0 technology, which can provide higher bandwidth and lower latency.

According to NVIDIA, the BlueField3 chip is expected to be sampled in the Q1 quarter of 2022 and will be fully backward compatible with the BlueField2 chip.