The Architecture Argument with Xsight Labs

Yoav Galon, VP of Software at Xsight Labs, made the architectural case for the E1 DPU at Networking Field Day 41. He explained why Xsight built a many-core, on-path Arm compute fabric running standard Linux instead of an offload NIC with added cores, and walked through the E1’s programmable PCIe fabric, inline acceleration, open-source ESDK, and power-efficiency claims. Galon leads E-Series development and has spent nearly seven years at Xsight.

Galon argued that conventional DPUs fail because requirements change faster than fixed pipelines and customers struggle to program them, so services spill onto the Arm cores, creating internal bandwidth churn, jitter, and latency. The E1 instead puts 64 Arm Neoverse N2 cores directly on the data path, backed by inline networking, storage, and crypto acceleration plus deep on-chip buffering and DDR5 bandwidth for deep packet inspection and incast. A synthetic DPDK forwarding benchmark sustained line rate with as few as eight cores per 400G port. Its 40 PCIe Gen5 lanes form a programmable fabric that can act as root or endpoint, trap configuration and MMIO transactions, and emulate any device topology, making every packet and NVMe command a software decision. Xsight ships the E1 as a PCIe adapter card and as a 1RU evaluation server.

Galon positioned feature velocity as the payoff: a new capability becomes a software update rather than a silicon respin. The ESDK, including the PCIe pieces, is open source, and Arm SystemReady certification lets customers run unmodified Ubuntu, SONiC, or Debian distributions. Reference applications include a software-defined RoCEv2 implementation and SONiC DASH, which Galon said made the E1 the first and, as far as Xsight knows, only DPU to pass the Hero 800 benchmark at 800G. He also cited up to 2.6x memory bandwidth per watt and 1.6x integer compute per watt against comparable Arm designs. Customers span AI storage, KV cache, JBOFs, SDN appliances, hyperscalers, and space, and Galon closed by asking operators where their data plane should live and what happened the last time a new threat forced them to change it.