Domain specific processors are a mega-trend in the semiconductor industry, so we see new three letter acronyms like DPU, for Data Processing Unit. System level performance can actually be improved by moving some of the tasks away from the CPU. Companies like Xilinx (Alveo), Amazon (Nitro) and NVIDIA (BlueField) have been talking about DPU architecture for awhile now, and the SmartNIC is now being called a DPU in the hyper-scale data centers.

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