Intel QuickAssist is a "Cheat Code" for Server Performance 

That is a wise observation.

You are correct, so-called smart nics will include different accelerators, but the best will be re-programmable ones such as FPGA based designs where you can load on different accelerators that you actually require, including bug fixes and upgrades.

We will probably be adding an 18th team member in Q4. Shoot me a note if you are serious and what you are looking to do and if you are thinking part time or more full time. We usually have folks start part-time to see how they actually like reviewing hardware.

There was even a difference in the like v1.5 and v1.6 that mattered when we did it in 2016-2017.

Thank you. Glad you liked it.

@@ServeTheHomeVideo Too much waffle at the beginning for me.

Ha! I have to record before I have coffee in the morning or very late at night just to tone it down to where it is today.

Thanks a ton. Have a great day.

Super fun is that these are PCHs on the PCIe card

Awesome! I was there during the heat wave at the end of June for this.

AMD's solution is Xilinx/ Pensando.

You can. I just tested a QAT add-in card on an AMD system using SQL Server 2022 RC0 which can offload backup compression with QAT. Works like a charm. No idea how much faster or slower the CPU version of QAT is since I don't have access to that kind of hardware. I also have allot of questions on how this is going to work with a hypervisor sitting in between. I don't want to pass the QAT device to just one VM, I want all VM's to be able to use QAT acceleration. Does the CPU version show up as a discrete PCIe device or is it more like a instruction set extension?

@@ServeTheHomeVideo the question was not about AMD hardware, but rather about using the Intel QAT hardware on AMD hardware, which is a supported modality. It is a shame that STH didn't think of that...

Let's see the AMD Xilinx/Pensando version of this next then!

Yes, Soni said we would do the Pensando one soon when I spoke with her last week. It has been hard to get cards but it is on the plan.

Thanks Jay

That actually got laugh out of me.

Glad it was helpful!

It is more likely to happen with TrueNAS Scale since that is Linux based.

@@ServeTheHomeVideo I would be okay with that. (Especially if it could get Scale up to the same performance as Core)

cable management for a bench test that's just going to get immediately torn back down is just a waste of time

Check out our Netgate 4100 review. pfSense Plus can use QAT. Opnsense also supports QAT.

It doesn’t neglect it. They have AES-NI but he chose to compare Intel with hardware acceleration against AMD without AES-NI(hardware acceleration).

@@aliancemd Interesting. I assumed that "Quick Assist" was NOT part of the AES-NI instructions set. Worthing researching

@@jaffarbh It is not part of AES-NI but it is a competing technology in the workflow that was presented in the video. Also, the video uses CPU + Dedicated QAT PCI hardware to compare against AMD without using AES-NI.

@@aliancemd Fair point. Intel has already embedded QAT into the latest Xeons. The real question is whether equivalent QAT accelertion exists in AMD processors. In any case, this is a specialist market and not something eveyone needs. May be AMD doesn't see the need to dedicate silicon for it.

Probably less common in the very near term for the desktop, but this is what storage vendors use QAT for.

That is Quick Sync. Intel went on a "Quick...." binge for a bit.

That would be a DPU/ IPU at this point.

@@ServeTheHomeVideo Well, no not really, there'd still be no CPU core complex on the card so it wouldn't pass your own 8 point 'is this a DPU?' checklist.

Ah I meant more like Mt. Evans would be the closest product, or the FPGAs. But if you went FPGA + EPYC embedded, then you would get Xilinx most likely.

that should already be possible w/o QAT unless you're running on something really terrible

Bummer! I was in the cafeteria and people were saying hi quite a bit.

You should try that with Overly Sarcastic Productions ;)

Pensando and Xilinx.

@@ServeTheHomeVideo That's exactly what I thought while you were talking about the accelerator card. The functionality on there will probably be folded into the DPU which also means we will have more vendors putting out products which can do this.

Pensando and Xilinx will be

I asked AMD for its Pensando/ Xilinx solutions but they still have not sent cards. Only so long we can wait. We cover Pensando a lot on the main site

@@ServeTheHomeVideo so will xilinx and bluefield solutions be able to do this same sort of thing? I'm curious what the implementations will be like on the software stack in order to utilize the offload, and if there is direct hardware support in those cards to accelerate these functions (specific cyphers, etc), and if so or if not, will that affect bandwidth, latency, Max # of connections, and power efficiency. I'd be VERY curious to have these same tests and cases with the same basic base hardware paired with nvidia and amd accel/dpu cards benchmarked the same way (if possible) so that these numbers could be put side by side with them, and show how intel compares to other vendor solutions (and how much work it would be on the software side to implement - like is there native support for each solution in popular products like pfsense, web server stacks, etc)

No coffee. I record these usually between 4:30AM and 7:30AM before any coffee so I do not get too excited

We used a faster AMD CPU so when we did things like acceleration via ISA-L AMD was faster due to the clock speed and extra TDP it had. The TDP difference between lower power Intel parts and the higher power AMD SKUs we used is about the same as QAT card TDP. AMD has promised the Pensando solution for example, but has yet to deliver cards and we cannot eBay them. When Pensando cards arrive, we will look at those.

@@ServeTheHomeVideo showing that a specialized HW unit + CPU can draw the same power as another CPU isn't any less silly, and excusing this with AMD not yet delivering similar HW isn't a very good excuse for making a silly and utterly useless "comparison".

What is the alternative though? No major server vendors support QAT cards in EPYC systems. You can put them in, but that is a one-off unsupported configuration that would be a lab project, not something that people would really deploy. That is why we need AMD's accelerators so we can have real solutions not lab experiments.

@@ServeTheHomeVideo the alternative is to not do silly stuff and only report on what the QAT can do. The fact that QAT doesn't work on EPYC is partially (if not fully) Intel's fault, so trying to put this on AMD is just even more silly. BTW, an accelerator from AMD will perform very differently, and comparing the two would also make little sense, these are very specific SW accelerators, but you probably already know that?

@@brynyard it's not silly at all. If there is no industry supported alternative for amd systems, this could mean the difference between choosing an intel or an amd platform for a specific application based purely on the amount of resources we've just been shown get used. This may be a huge realization for a lot of people, and may affect purchasing decisions for variously sized projects. In larger data centers, optimizing for a specific use case can potentially mean the difference of a ton of power, latency, number of connections a server can make while still performing work with those connections, so users per server, so then number of total servers, so data center sizing, etc. This may have huge implications for our very Internet-oriented data centers, with all kinds of encryption and very little inter-data center machine-to-machine trust.

The 2nd gen cards are not crazy expensive.

The QAT cards are basically server PCHs on a card so they are like 23W TDP parts. That is why I wanted to use EPYC CPUs with 15W each more (30W total) to at least bridge some of the gap.

Wow! In seconds!