Gate array for data plane, CPU cores for control plane
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Xilinx will today launch a network card that not only offloads acceleration to an FPGA but also to an on-board NXP chip containing 16 Arm CPU cores.
The Cortex-A72 Arm core cluster is expected to run Linux – Ubuntu and Yocto are supported – and act as the control plane, and the gate array as the data plane chugging through packets flowing in and out of the card. The addition of extra CPU oomph is perhaps a sign that customers wanted to run application software and services on the board as well as use its raw hardware acceleration. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu are supported for the host system.