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The article reviews the four-stage evolution of network adapters—from traditional NICs to smart NICs, FPGA‑based DPUs, and DPU‑SoC cards—detailing their hardware features, programmable capabilities, deployment methods, and use cases in modern cloud and virtualization environments.
Tencent’s hardware teams evolved from a lack of verification tools in 2019 to building AI inference chips, video‑encoding silicon, and intelligent NICs, overcoming FPGA challenges, scaling cloud infrastructure, and delivering high‑performance, low‑cost solutions for massive multimedia and AI workloads.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Data Processing Units (DPUs), tracing their evolution from smart NICs, explaining their architecture, advantages such as workload offloading, zero‑trust security, and compute‑storage separation, and discussing future trends and NVIDIA's roadmap for integrated CPU‑GPU‑DPU solutions in data‑center and edge environments.