Introduction
Rev 1.9
13
Mellanox Technologies
1.4
Features and Benefits
Table 4 - Features
a
PCI Express (PCIe)
Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (1.1 and 2.0 compatible) through an x8
edge
connector up to
8GT/s
Up to Gigabit Ethernet
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:
–
50GbE / 40GbE /
25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE
– 25G Ethernet Consortium 25
, 50
Ethernet Consortium 50
– IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3by 25 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation and KR startup
– IEEE 802.3ad, 802.1AX Link Aggregation
– IEEE 802.1Q, 802.1P VLAN tags and priority
– IEEE 802.1Qau (QCN)
– Congestion Notification
– IEEE 802.1Qaz (ETS)
– IEEE 802.1Qbb (PFC)
– IEEE 802.1Qbg
– IEEE 1588v2
– Jumbo frame support (9.6KB)
Memory
PCI Express - stores and accesses Ethernet fabric connection information and
packet data.
SPI - includes one 16MB SPI Flash device (W25Q128FVSIG device by WIN-
BOND-NUVOTON).
Overlay Networks
In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay
networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels
in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network
scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines,
placing higher loads on the host CPU. ConnectX-4 Lx effectively addresses this
by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that
encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol header as well as offloads TCP
stateless activities on the encapsulated packet.
RDMA and RDMA over
Converged Ethernet
(RoCE)
ConnectX-4 Lx, utilizing IBTA RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) tech-
nology, delivers low-latency and high-performance over Ethernet networks.
Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 Lx
advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient
low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
Mellanox PeerDirect™
PeerDirect™ communication provides high efficiency RDMA access by eliminat-
ing unnecessary internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus (for
example, from GPU to CPU), and therefore significantly reduces application run
time. ConnectX-4 Lx advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster
efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.
CPU Offload
Adapter functionality enabling reduced CPU overhead allowing more available
CPU for computation tasks.
