community.arm.com, Nov. 14, 2019 –
A SmartNIC is a Network Interface Card that includes general-purpose CPUs. The CPUs are used to offload processing that is done by server CPUs. Arm CPUs are being selected for SmartNIC SoCs because of their efficiency, performance, and the well supported software ecosystem. For example, two Arm-based SmartNIC platforms are the Broadcom Stingray and Mellanox Bluefield. These platforms are built around Arm A-72 CPUs. SmartNICs also include DRAM and storage and boot standard operating systems like Linux. In fact, a SmartNIC can appear as a host on the network. For this reason, SmartNICs enable use cases that go far beyond networking. Ultimately, the advantage of using a SmartNIC is that they reduce operating costs by efficiently offloading processing from servers.
SmartNIC Use Cases
The base use case for a SmartNIC is networking offload. Although a "dumb" NIC is capable of accelerating network processing, they are limited to fixed functions like TCP and VXLAN offload. SmartNICs have these fixed function accelerators as well, but the addition of the CPUs makes them more flexible and powerful.