Xsight Labs Announcing E1L with Yoav Galon

Yoav Galon of Xsight Labs introduced the E1L at Networking Field Day 41, a 200G member of the E-Series DPU family that scales the E1 architecture down to lower power and cost. He detailed its three SKUs, shared SDK, and new form factors, including a COM Express module, and mapped the E-Series to cloud, edge, control plane, and storage use cases. Eric Vallone joined Galon in fielding delegate questions on target markets.

The E1L, sampling in the second quarter of next year, keeps the E1’s Arm Neoverse N2 cores and 5nm process in 8-, 16-, and 22-core SKUs that also differ in cache and DDR interface count. It offers up to 12 MB of on-chip system cache shared by compute and I/O, so much traffic never touches DRAM, along with up to two DDR5 interfaces with memory encryption. Four SerDes lanes of up to 100G each deliver 200G total, with programmable parsing, inline AES-GCM and AES-XTS for IPsec, and the same programmable PCIe fabric as the E1. Xsight added a UFS flash controller for embedded designs and kept a single SDK and binary across every SKU, so customers develop and qualify once. Form factors include a half-length 1U evaluation server and a COM Express Type 7 module in a 20-watt envelope, which partners and ODMs are bringing to sampling next year.

Delegates pressed on where the part fits, and the presenters pointed to telco edge, customer-premises equipment, branch offices, and the network processor market they said incumbents have overlooked, stressing that cost matters as much as power for large deployments. Galon framed the COM Express module as a step up for switches and routers running lean control-plane processors that now need cores for monitoring and telemetry. Across the E-Series, he listed host-side infrastructure processing, bump-in-the-wire and smart-switch SDN services, edge compute, and storage and KV cache appliances, with the E1 supporting up to eight SSDs. The most notable new use case is the Ethernet SSD, where Galon said the E1L makes per-drive erasure coding, dedup, and KV cache services feasible on cost and power for the first time, with customers already building disaggregated storage around it.