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NVIDIA BlueField

STORAGE

Accessories

7/8/2025

STORAGE

Accessories

5,0

What is NVIDIA BlueField

NVIDIA BlueField is a family of specialized data processing units (DPUs, Data Processing Units) designed to accelerate and optimize network functions in today's data centers. BlueField offloads tasks such as network management, security, data access, and virtualization from central processing units (CPUs), enabling high performance, security, and infrastructure efficiency.

Distinctive features of NVIDIA BlueField:

Feature

Description

Purpose

Hardware acceleration of networking (Ethernet, InfiniBand), storage (NVMe over Fabrics), and security (encryption, firewall, IDS/IPS, etc.) functions for data centers.

Models and generations

BlueField-2, BlueField-3, BlueField-4 (upcoming).

Network Capabilities

Up to 200 Gbps with BlueField-2, up to 400 Gbps with BlueField-3, up to 800 Gbps with BlueField-4 (upcoming). Ethernet and InfiniBand support.

Processor cores

BlueField-2 - 8 ARM Cortex A72 cores;
BlueField-3 - 16 ARM Cortex A78;

Memory

Up to 32GB DDR4 (BlueField-2) and DDR5 (BlueField-3) with ECC support.

Interfaces

BlueField-2 - PCIe Gen4,
BlueField-3 - PCIe Gen5.

Hardware acceleration

IPsec/TLS/AES-XTS encryption, compression, data deduplication, hard isolation, traffic filtering, RegEx processing, and more.

Software and ecosystem

Native support for NVIDIA DOCA SDK to create applications that utilize BlueField hardware acceleration. Support for SDN, NVMe-oF, distributed NGFW, and micro-segmentation.

Applications

Used in hyperscalers, cloud, HPC, 5G networks, telecommunications, AI acceleration, data storage and protection.

Energy efficiency and performance

BlueField-3 is comparable in compute performance to a 12-core server CPU, while being more energy efficient and with less load on the host. BlueField-4 promises still significant growth.


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