China’s first homegrown DPU gains breakthroughs

China's first homegrown DPU, or data processing unit, announced new breakthroughs in terms of technology and performance recently, as the country's chip development has continued to gain momentum despite rising suppression from leading Western countries.

Yusur, a leading DPU startup backed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, launched its third-generation DPU chip, K2-Pro, earlier last week, claiming the chip to be mass produced already. It only took the Chinese startup six years to complete the iteration of three generations of chips.

According to Yan Guihai, CEO of Yusur, the latest DPU chip, with 80 million packets per second (Mpps), is able to support a network bandwidth of up to 200G and address performance bottlenecks in large-scale data centers.

Compared with its previous version of DPU chips that was launched in 2022, the K2-Pro boasts a 30 percent reduction in power consumption, Yan said.

DPU is known as the third mainstream chip after CPU, or central processing unit, and GPU, or graphics processing unit. It is widely considered as key technology for the next generation of chip competition.

Zheng Weimin, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor at Tsinghua University, said that China must break the monopoly of foreign chip giants in the DPU sector to ensure security and independent development of the computing power.

"International players like Nvidia, Intel and AMD have already introduced their DPU products. It is crucial for domestic DPU firms to strengthen basic research, leverage resource and technology advantages, focus on industrial innovation, and advance core technological breakthroughs," he said.