Decisive Victory East and West Counting: DPU "Core" Track, 2025 To See?

Jiwei network news, "East number west calculation" this national large project was officially launched, the domestic chip market around the "XPU" discussion has never stopped. After all, from basic computing power, intelligent computing power to super-computing power, a large number of data center clusters and computing power networks behind "East Counting West Computing" need to be empowered by various XPU chips from CPUs and GPUs to FPGAs, ASICs, DPU, and IPU. In particular, the current financing of hot DPU is becoming the backbone of the "East Counting West Calculation" wave of computing power revolution.

The reason why DPU can have the opportunity to show its fist in the data center market, industry insiders said, "Behind it is because of the performance growth rate of traditional CPUs and the growth rate of data volume There is a 'scissor difference' phenomenon." ”

According to cbn data, before 2010, the annualized growth rate of network bandwidth was about 30%, but now it has increased to 45%. In contrast, the performance growth of the CPU has dropped from 23% 10 years ago to 3% today, when the proportion of network bandwidth growth and CPU performance growth rate reaches 10 times, the CPU is almost unable to directly cope with the growth rate of network bandwidth, which naturally gives DPUs more market opportunities.

The vigorous advance of the "East Counting West Counting" project has added another "fire" to the already hot DPU track.

Startups flock to the DPU track, with a market of more than $1 billion in 2022

In the application of the "East Number West Calculation" project, there is no direct competitive relationship between the DPU and the CPU and gpu, and Li Shuang, founder and CEO of Dayu Zhixin, told the author: "The underlying logic of the emergence of the DPU is to improve the processing efficiency of the CPU, release the CPU computing power, and provide basic data services for the CPU and gpu, and the relationship between them is complementary." With the ability to efficiently relocate data, decoupling resource pooling is becoming a necessary technical capability for new high-performance computing architectures. In both areas, DPUs can perform capabilities that other types of processing units do not have. ”

It is because of this feature that the DPU track has also attracted entries such as Nvidia, Intel, Broadcom, and Marvell in recent years. And on April 5, AMD acquired Pensando, a cloud startup, for $1.9 billion. Through this acquisition, AMD also officially announced its entry into the DPU field. As a result, the world's top five giants in this field have joined the DPU battlefield.

Different from overseas tracks, the domestic DPU industry is currently dominated by startups, few large-scale technology companies have entered, and the entire market is still in the stage of chaos. The launch of the "East Counting West" outlet has also injected more capital and cash flow into these small enterprises.

Throughout the past year, more than 8 companies, including Zhongke Yishu, Dayu Zhixin, Nebulas Zhilian, Eastex Technology, Edge Zhixin and other enterprises have obtained financing, ranging from tens of millions to hundreds of millions. In March this year, Xin Qiyuan received another strategic investment of more than 100 million yuan.

But this is only the beginning, industry insiders believe that the "East counting west" wave of enthusiasm is continuous, in the next few years, the domestic DPU field will gradually join more players, including some well-known large technology companies, DPU track will become more crowded.

Source: Head Leopard Institute

According to the forecast of the Head Leopard Research Institute, the size of China's DPU market is expected to exceed 1 billion US dollars in 2022, and it will be close to 3.74 billion US dollars in 2025, with a CAGR of 112%. In addition, because the data center bandwidth upgrade cycle is generally about 3 years, this also means that 2023-2025 will enter the next round of server equipment and DPU replacement cycle, and the size of the DPU market will have a significant increase.

2-3 years to see the difference: DPU is the ultimate big factory game?

From 2022 onwards, DPU will really play a role in the "East And West" or other types of data center application markets, let alone 2-3 years, which also gives the startups who are currently in the melee period sufficient reserve time.

Combining the views of many industry insiders, they all believe that after 2-3 years, the DPU market will really begin to explode. Because at present, it will take at least 2-3 years for each company's DPU to be designed this year to the time the real hardware system is formed. In the past three years, the competitive relationship between various enterprises may not be very strong, and what is important is to compete for who can carry out technology iteration faster and truly introduce products into the market.

After 2-3 years, when the DPU products have entered the market one after another, the war between DPU companies will also be completely ignited. At that time, the industry will gradually move towards a similar "style" of the AI chip track in the past, that is, competing in advanced processes, advanced packaging, etc., and then completely entering the era of competition of heterogeneous systems.

Li Shuang also told the author: "The maturity period of the DPU market is expected to be around 2025, and it will not begin to erupt after the hardware and software mature synchronously. As a technology company focusing on the field of DPU, Dayu Zhixin will continue to work hard in this field to promote DPU to large-scale commercialization. ”

However, with reference to the history of the transformation of the market pattern of AI chip market in the past, in the long run, the DPU track is likely to no longer be a start-up melee market. With the influx of more and more capital and large enterprises, eventually powerful large companies will become the dominant force in the entire market.

But Li Shuang also expressed his own views: "The applicability of the DPU itself is relatively wide, and it is a data processing engine with a high-speed network as the core, so the application scenarios are relatively extensive." But in the end, the DPU market will form 3-5 mainstream DPU manufacturers, whose products are cloud computing-based product lines, and there will also be dozens or even hundreds of companies with DPU products, which take the vertical field as the core, and build innovative products and higher performance product lines through the combination of DPU and vertical fields. ”

(Proofreading/xiao wei)