NVIDIA BlueField is a family of Data Processing Units (DPUs) designed to offload infrastructure tasks such as networking, storage, and security from the CPU to dedicated, programmable hardware. BlueField DPUs combine high-performance Arm cores with Mellanox ConnectX network interfaces and are aimed at accelerating cloud, enterprise, and edge workloads. The first-generation BlueField-1, introduced in the late 2010s, integrated Mellanox’s ConnectX-5 network adapter with Armv8 cores and basic acceleration capabilities. It was mainly adopted in storage and early network acceleration contexts, offering a glimpse into the potential of DPUs to reshape system architecture.

The BlueField-2 and BlueField-3 generations significantly expanded performance and programmability. BlueField-2, built on ConnectX-6, delivered up to 200 Gbps network throughput and supported NVIDIA DOCA (Data Center Infrastructure-on-a-Chip Architecture) for software-defined, secure data center management. BlueField-3, launched in 2022, featured up to 16 Arm A78 cores, PCIe Gen 5, and 400 Gbps networking. It targets AI workloads, zero-trust security, and multi-tenant cloud environments. Future generations, like BlueField-4, are expected to integrate tighter with NVIDIA GPUs and Grace CPUs, furthering the vision of data center infrastructure as composable, secure, and AI-accelerated.

Given the large number of DPU SKUs available in the market, a list of tested and validated DPU models is made available. Note that only the DPU SKUs listed in the document shown below are officially supported and tested for compatibility with the rXg implementation. 

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