What Is A Data Processing Unit (DPU) And Why Is NVIDIA Betting On It?
At the GPU Technology Conference 2020, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, unveiled a new family of processors branded as the BlueField-2 Data Processing Unit (DPU). The DPU is accessible to the developers via the software platform, the DOCA SDK. The DPU and DOCA SDK are comparable to NVIDIA’s powerful combination of GPU hardware and CUDA software.

Jenson Huang, CEO
Having dominated the AI accelerator market, NVIDIA is now aiming to expand it to the data center infrastructure acceleration and optimization.
Why is Jensen Huang bullish about the DPU market and how it matters to the enterprise data center? Here is an attempt to explain the evolution of DPU in simple terms.
The Aggregation and Disaggregation of Enterprise Infrastructure
During the 90s, the combination of Intel x86 CPU and OS software offered unmatched power to enterprises. The rise of client/server computing, followed by n-tier computing, paved the way for distributed computing.