In The Matrix Reloaded, the character Link confirms that "The One" has evolved by saying Neo's "doing his Superman thing." LDA Technologies was doing its "Superman thing" when they re-engineered their wildly popular Neo, replacing the Intel processor complex with the latest generation AMD EPYC server processors. Built on AMD's Infinity Architecture, LDA has fully leveraged many of these new capabilities of its new Neo Infinity. From 128 lanes of 4th Generation PCI Express (PCIe) to the enhanced memory design and improved bandwidth, as well as advances in scalar and floating-point performance, the Neo Infinity is a substantially superior product.
The new AMD-powered Neo Infinity utilizes a 4th Generation PCI Express bus, which delivers twice the throughput of the Intel processor's 3rd generation. This means that NVMe drives, each of which uses four PCIe lanes, can now plug into connectors providing up to 8 GB/sec of effective throughput. The fastest NVMe drives available today only support a write speed of about 4.4 GB/sec, but it's merely a matter of time before these drives reach the limits of the bus on which they reside. This means that with RAID0 configured, and the fastest NVMe drives available today, the Neo Infinity can write over 100 Gbps striped across all three disks. This is enough write bandwidth to storage to support line-rate 100Gbps Ethernet packet capture.
AMD's Infinity Architecture includes 128 lanes of PCIe, so Neo Infinity now supports not one PCIe Gen 3 by 16 lane slot but two full-height, full-length PCIe Gen 4 by 16 slots for FPGA boards. Each of these slots now provides 32GB/sec of throughput, double the prior generation, and the second slot once again doubles the system bandwidth. This means that the Neo Infinity can now provide high resolution timestamping on 16 ports instead of eight while also routing these ports to packet capture.
The Neo Infinity slot for the network capture card has been upgraded from PCIe Gen3 to Gen4, so the effective bandwidth to memory for this slot has also jumped up from 16 GB/sec or 128 Gbps to 32 GB/sec or 256 Gbps. This enables the Neo Infinity to run twice as many captured packets into memory as was previously possible. Intel's newest E810 2x100 GbE Network Interface (NIC) card is a native PCIe Gen4 device and is an excellent choice for budget-based packet capture. Currently, Napatech solutions are PCIe Gen3 devices, but these often have substantial amounts of their own memory, which can be used to buffer packet bursts during capture.
Architecturally the AMD platform theoretically supports up to 4TB of real memory across eight memory channels. LDA is utilizing a four-channel system board design. With today's memory packaging technology, using 128 GB sticks, the Neo Infinity can support up to 512 GB of real memory or four times the current Intel-based Neo's memory capability. More memory means that more packets can be simultaneously analyzed without requiring I/O to disk.
The new Neo Infinity supports the full range of Ethernet bandwidths from 10 GbE through 25 GbE, 40 GbE, 50 Gbe, and 100 GbE. Additionally, the Neo Infinity now includes support for the Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) data rates. This enables the Neo Infinity to be deployed in 5G applications where high data rate support at low latency has become a requirement. As mentioned earlier, AMD provides significant improvements in scaler and floating-point computing performance per core over the previous EPYC platform. These improvements come in extremely handy as you leverage the Neo Infinity platform to do both packet and flow analytics. Flow analysis can require considerable scaler computation when looking for patterns in large datasets, and the AMD platform is ideal for sifting through this data.
As you might recall, "The Matrix Reloaded" ended with a substantial cliff-hanger; Neo was in a coma, with his consciousness stuck in Limbo* between the real world and the Matrix. If you're now a fan of the LDA Neo Infinity, then, unfortunately, you'll also be in Limbo while LDA puts the finishing touches on the Neo Infinity and prepares try-and-buy units for potential customers. Initially, these units will be scarce, so you should reach out to your LDA sales team right away to get in the queue for try-and-buys as they become available.
*Limbo is an anagram from Mobil, the subway station where Neo was trapped by the Trainman.
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