Xsight Labs Partners with Edgecore Networks to Bring 800G DPU to PCIe Add-In Card Form Factor

Summary:

• Utilizing Xsight Labs’ E1 SoC, the Edgecore Networks Add-In Card delivers bandwidth with an industry’s first 800G DPU, incorporating 64 Arm N2 Cores in a low power PCIe AIC form factor.
• E1-AIC delivers high performance, lower latency, and greater efficiency for today’s most demanding AI, security, storage, and networking workloads.
• E1-AIC utilizes Software Defined Networking (SDN) and a fully programmable RoCEv2 software stack to enhance data center performance, efficiency, and security.

Xsight Labs and Edgecore Networks Corp. announced availability of a first 800G PCIe add-in card (AIC), delivering unprecedented performance to hyperscale AI workloads.

The E1 AIC is purpose-built to meet the rapidly growing demands of AI, cloud and HPC workloads, extending Xsight Labs’ leadership in high-performance connectivity. The E1 AIC delivers unmatched bandwidth, low latency, and advanced data offload capabilities designed to allow greater utilization of accelerated compute and GPU clusters.

Why It Matters
The gigawatt-scale era requires exponential growth in network bandwidth, model complexity, and cluster sizes. As agentic AI, large language models (LLMs), and distributed training continue to push the limits of data center infrastructure, traditional CPUs and NICs are bottlenecks. As Neo-clouds offer greater specialization and multi-tenancy, advanced security becomes vital. Xsight Labs’ new DPU (Data Processing Unit) add-in card is engineered to overcome these challenges — enabling smarter, secure, faster, and more efficient data processing from the edge to the large-scale AI and data center infrastructure.

Building New DPU Solution
Xsight Labs, in collaboration with Edgecore Networks has produced an industry’s 1st PCIe add-in card delivering 800Gb throughput (2x400G, 4x200G, 8x100G) for PCIe 5.0 host systems. It is designed to be ARM System Ready Level 6 and can work with virtually any standard server. The E1 AIC offers the greatest compute density/watt of alternative DPUs, enabling up to 320 Arm N2 cores per 19” Rack Unit (RU) in an air-cooled data center.

“As evidenced by merchant-built revenues more than doubling year-over-year, the DPU market is moving beyond a few large hyperscalers building their own in-house products,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research. “Expansion of existing use cases, in addition to newer applications including generative AI front-end, DPU-enabled Ethernet switches, and CPU replacement, are driving this strong growth. With its E1-AIC offering a compelling set of features at the industry’s highest DPU speed of 800G, Xsight Labs is delivering the right product at the right time to enable customer success and differentiation.”

From a security perspective, the E1-AIC is a self-contained PCIe add-in card with its own 64 Arm N2 cores and can run workloads independently of the host x86 CPU. This creates an air gap between the DPU and the x86 core so sensitive operations like packet inspection, encryption/decryption, and traffic analysis can be executed entirely on the card without exposing them directly to the host CPU’s attack surface, enabling more robust, stateful security at scale.

Powering Workloads with E1
The E1-AIC utilizes innovative Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Storage (SDS), resulting in enhanced data center performance, efficiency, and security. The E1-AIC also features a fully programmable RoCEv2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) software stack. Bypassing the CPU and handling data movement directly with RoCEv2, the E1-AIC delivers faster transfers, low latency, and greater efficiency for high-performance computing, cloud, AI/ML workloads, and data-intensive applications. The E1 800G DPU completely passed the SONiC-DASH full-scale Hero 800G test with zero dropped packets at 14.25 million connections per second, validating the industry-leading performance and readiness of the E1 for robust at scale deployments.

Perspectives:
“We are excited to introduce the world’s first 2x400G QSFP-112 Data Processing Unit, designed for host virtualization across security, networking, storage, and even ARM-based general compute — delivered in a full-height, three-quarter length form factor powered by Xsight Labs’ Edge Server Infrastructure SoC,” said Mingshou Liu, president, Edgecore. “As cloud and AI workloads continue to scale, we see opportunities to accelerate storage virtualization at the host and eliminate storage bottlenecks at the front end, moving seamlessly from 200G and 400G to 800G over Ethernet networks.”

“Xsight Labs’ E1-AIC uniquely combines the openness of an Arm server with 800 Gbps of network throughput,” said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst, Wheeler’s Network. “This combination makes the E1-AIC a powerful building block for a wide variety of SDN applications using open-source stacks such as DPDK and SONiC.”

Resources:
E1-AIC product brief   
E-Series webpage   
E-Series WP   
Xsight Softens the DPU whitepaper