Intel's E2200 "Mount Morgan" IPU at Hot Chips 2025

Summary

Intel’s IPUs, or Infrastructure Processing Units, evolved as network adapters developed increasingly sophisticated offload capabilities. IPUs take things a step further, aiming to take on a wide variety of infrastructure services in a cloud environment in addition to traditional software defined networking functions. Infrastructure services are run by the cloud operator and orchestrate tasks like provisioning VMs or collecting metrics. They won’t stress a modern server CPU, but every CPU core set aside for those tasks is one that can’t be rented out to customers. Offloading infrastructure workloads also provides an extra layer of isolation between a cloud provider’s code and customer workloads. If a cloud provider rents out bare metal servers, running infrastructure services within the server may not even be an option.Intel’s incoming “Mount Morgan” IPU packs a variety of highly configurable accelerators alongside general purpose CPU cores, and aims to capture as many infrastructure tasks as possible. It shares those characteristics with its predecessor, “Mount Evans”. Flexibility is the name of the game with these IPUs, which can appear as a particularly capable network card to up to four host servers, or run standalone to act as a small server. Compared to Mount Evans, Mount Morgan packs more general purpose compute power, improved accelerators, and more off-chip bandwidth to support the whole package.Intel includes a set of Arm cores in their IPU, because CPUs are the ultimate word in programmability. They run Linux and let the IPU handle a wide range of infrastructure services, and ensure the IPU stays relevant as infrastructure requirements change. Mount Morgan’s compute complex gets an upgrade to 24 Arm Neoverse N2 cores, up from 16 Neoverse N1 cores in Mount Evans. Intel didn’t disclose the exact core configuration, but Mount Evans set its Neoverse N1 cores up with 512 KB L2 caches and ran them at 2.5 GHz. It’s not the fastest Neoverse N1 configuration around...