Chelsio Launches Seventh-Generation AI Interconnect Platform
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Chelsio announces its Seventh-Generation AI Interconnect Platform, introducing a comprehensive portfolio of SmartNICs, Storage Controllers, and Data Processing Units (DPUs) designed to accelerate AI training, inference, storage, and cloud networking. Built on the proven Unified Wire architecture, the platform delivers native 400GbE, Unified RDMA (iWARP and RoCEv2), advanced storage acceleration, and AI infrastructure optimization while preserving software compatibility across previous Chelsio generations.
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AI Interconnect Platform Key Capabilities:
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1/10/25/40/50/100/200/400GbE connectivity with sustained line-rate performance |
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Native 400GbE Unified RDMA (iWARP and RoCEv2) for ultra-low-latency AI, HPC, and distributed computing workloads |
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Hardware acceleration for NVMe/TCP, NVMe-oF, iSCSI, TOE, QUIC, kTLS, TLS, and IPsec |
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AI-optimized networking with lossless Ethernet, advanced congestion management, and GPU-optimized data paths |
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Programmable data path for workload-specific acceleration, inline processing, and AI data pipeline optimization |
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Virtualization and cloud acceleration with SR-IOV, vSwitch, and container offloads |
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PCIe Gen5, OCP 3.0, and mezzanine form factors for flexible deployment |
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Industry-leading performance-per-watt with software continuity from Chelsio T4 through T6 platforms |
AI Interconnect Product Family
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The platform spans three product categories built on Chelsio's seventh-generation offload architecture: S7 SmartNICs, memory-free single-chip solutions optimized for cloud, virtualization, edge, and AI deployments; T7 Storage Controllers, dedicated storage acceleration adapters offloading NVMe/TCP, NVMe-oF, iSCSI, and RDMA workloads; and T7 DPUs, fully programmable adapters that accelerate AI networking, storage, and security with native support for up to 400GbE.
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S7250 / S7450 / S7450-OCP SmartNICs : Dual- and quad-port 1/10/25/50 GbE SmartNICs based on the S7 architecture, optimized for virtualization, embedded systems, and edge deployments. |
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S72200 / S72200-OCP SmartNICs: Dual-port 40/50/100/200 GbE SmartNICs using the S7 silicon, ideal for high-volume cloud, HPC, and AI infrastructure. |
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S71400 SmartNIC: Single-port 400GbE SmartNIC supporting flexible 4x100G and 2x200G modes for ultra-scale fabrics. |
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T71200-iNIC-L SmartNIC Adapter: Fully programmable T7 providing per-connection offload, direct data placement, and mixed stateful/stateless acceleration. |
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T72200/T7450 Storage Controllers: Dedicated storage acceleration controllers delivering hardware offloads for NVMe/TCP, NVMe-oF, iSCSI, RDMA, and enterprise storage workloads. Available in PCIe and OCP form factors. |
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T72200-DPU / T7450-DPU Adapters: Dual- and quad-port T7 DPU adapters featuring hardware NVMe/TCP and RDMA offloads, zero-copy, and kernel-bypass acceleration for AI and storage workloads. |
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Each adapter supports TCP/IP, UDP/IP, Unified RDMA (RoCEv2 and iWARP), iSCSI, NVMe-oF, NVMe/TCP, NVGRE, VXLAN, and TLS/IPsec/kTLS/QUIC offloads, so a single adapter can serve both traditional and AI-driven data-center workloads.
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Chelsio Unveils the T7 DPU: The Next Era of Unified Wire Innovation
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Chelsio is raising the bar for enterprise, cloud, and storage workloads with the launch of its seventh-generation T7 Data Processing Unit (DPU). Powered by the proven Unified Wire architecture, the new T7 ASICs and adapters deliver unmatched scalability, efficiency, and line-rate speed, making them well suited to handle the heavy demands of modern virtualized data centers and clustered computing environments. Start with the T7 Product Selector to find your ideal high-performance solution. T7 DPU supports:
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1/10/25/40/50/100/200/400GbE connectivity |
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Full hardware offload for NVMe/TCP, NVMe-oF (iWARP and RoCEv2), UDP, and iSCSI, enabling ultra-low-latency disaggregated storage and all-flash storage deployments |
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Controller Memory Buffer (CMB) and advanced NVMe features for latency-sensitive applications and low-overhead data movement |
Independent Industry Validation
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IDC Analyst Brief for DPU
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Examinations by leading market analysts provide crucial third-party validation for the DPU and SmartNIC market. The IDC Analyst Brief examines how Data Processing Units (DPUs) are transforming modern data center architectures, enabling offload and acceleration across AI networking, storage, security, virtualization, and edge workloads.
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Chelsio T7 Simplifies Migration to Next-Generation AI Ethernet Fabrics
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Chelsio announces the T7 AI Interconnect Platform, a next-generation Ethernet solution designed to power AI, cloud, HPC, and enterprise data center deployments. The platform delivers native 400GbE connectivity with PCIe Gen5 support, enabling organizations to build scalable, high-performance AI fabrics on open Ethernet infrastructure.
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Designed to simplify infrastructure upgrades, the T7 platform maintains software compatibility with previous T4, T5, and T6 generations, allowing customers to transition to higher network speeds while preserving existing software investments. It also incorporates lossless Ethernet, advanced congestion management, and GPU-optimized data paths to improve communication efficiency between compute nodes and storage. These capabilities help maximize GPU utilization while minimizing synchronization overhead in AI clusters.
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The platform also strengthens cloud-native deployments with integrated support for SR-IOV, virtual switching, and container offloads, enabling high-performance multi-tenant environments without compromising isolation or scalability.
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Accelerating FreeBSD with the T7 Unified Wire Adapter
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Chelsio continues to expand the capabilities of the seventh-generation adapter by bringing advanced networking, security, and storage acceleration to the FreeBSD 16.0 Inbox Kernel. Building on its high-performance NIC and TOE capabilities, the latest release introduces kTLS and NVMe/TCP Initiator and Target PDU offload, enabling a broader range of workloads to benefit from hardware acceleration.
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This seventh-generation Unified Wire Adapter supports TLS 1.3 and TLS 1.2 kTLS hardware offload in the transmit (TX) direction, allowing encrypted traffic to be processed directly by the adapter instead of the host CPU. This significantly reduces CPU utilization while maintaining high throughput for secure applications. In addition, NVMe/TCP Initiator and Target PDU offload accelerates storage traffic by offloading protocol processing from the CPU, improving storage performance, reducing latency, and enabling more efficient utilization of system resources.
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FreeBSD kTLS hardware offload has achieved up to 395 Gbps throughput while maintaining low CPU utilization, demonstrating the performance of the T7 architecture and showcasing the adapter's ability to deliver secure, high-speed networking for modern data center, cloud, AI, and storage environments, as outlined in the FreeBSD Inline kTLS 400G Performance White Paper.
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Chelsio Brings QUIC TX Offload to HTTP/3 Servers
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Chelsio continues to expand the capabilities of its seventh-generation adapters by bringing QUIC TX offload to Linux, helping HTTP/3 servers deliver high-throughput traffic with far less CPU overhead. QUIC runs in user space and encrypts every packet it sends, so at 100 Gbps and above the server spends a large share of its CPU on packet protection and segmentation. On Chelsio T7 and S7 adapters, transmit-side QUIC processing runs in adapter hardware, freeing host cores for the application while nginx continues to serve HTTP/3.
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In testing on Linux with an nginx HTTP/3 server and the h2load load generator over a single 200GbE link, QUIC TX offload reached 183 Gbps at MTU 9000 and 164 Gbps at MTU 1500 with 128 concurrent connections, compared with the same server running software QUIC with GSO:
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MTU 9000: Offload matched non-offload throughput while cutting server CPU utilization from 44% to 26%. |
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MTU 1500: Offload delivered about twice the non-offload throughput (164 vs. 81 Gbps) at 28% CPU instead of 44%. |
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Across all tests: Server CPU utilization was 30% to 47% lower with offload. |
New Products
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Chelsio T7 and S7 adapters now support NC-SI (DMTF DSP0222 v1.1), allowing a baseboard management controller (BMC) to send and receive traffic on the external network through the adapter, with the sideband protocol implemented entirely in firmware.
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Chelsio introduced Hairpin Mode (hardware bypass) support for T7 and S7 adapters on Linux, using firmware to forward traffic between adapter ports even when the driver is unloaded or fails. Driver and application deadman watchdogs switch the adapter to hairpin mode automatically on failure, helping keep inline appliances and network paths available.
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QUIC TX offload is now available on Linux for T7 and S7 adapters, moving transmit-side QUIC processing into hardware for HTTP/3 servers such as nginx. Testing reached 183 Gbps with up to 47% lower server CPU utilization.
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Chelsio T7/S7 adapters now support IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) on Linux, with hardware timestamping and a PTP hardware clock (PHC) for use with linuxptp. This enables precise time synchronization for financial, telecom, and AI/HPC cluster deployments.
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Chelsio announced the launch of its SPDK (Storage Performance Development Kit) User-Space Storage Acceleration solution, delivering high-performance, low-latency storage by supporting NVMe-oF over iWARP, RoCEv2, and TOE, as well as NVMe/TCP PDU Offload and iSCSI PDU Offload. By combining user-space processing with advanced hardware offloads, the solution maximizes throughput, reduces CPU utilization, and accelerates storage performance for AI, cloud, and enterprise deployments, including NVMe/TCP.
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Support for Chelsio T7 TLS 1.3 kTLS hardware offload (TX direction) and NVMe/TCP Initiator and Target PDU Offload is now part of FreeBSD 16.0 Inbox Kernel. Building on the industry-leading NIC and TOE capabilities, these new hardware offloads deliver secure, high-performance networking and storage acceleration while significantly reducing CPU utilization, increasing throughput, lowering latency, and improving overall system efficiency for enterprise, cloud, AI, and storage workloads.
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Chelsio announced the launch of Unified Storage Server (USS), which is a powerful turnkey solution for creating high-performance storage systems. It is an integrated solution that is best-of-breed in the market, providing an easy integration path for VARs and OEMs, and offers state-of-the-art performance and ease-of-use for end users.
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Recent Publications
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Chelsio published a paper, QUIC TX Offload for High-Throughput HTTP/3 on Linux with Chelsio T7, highlighting how the T7 adapter offloads transmit-side QUIC processing to hardware, delivering up to 183 Gbps with nginx HTTP/3 while cutting server CPU utilization by 30% to 47%. |
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Chelsio published a paper, Chelsio T7 NIC Performance Leadership Across TX, RX, and BiDi Workloads, illustrating how Chelsio T7 adapters deliver exceptional networking performance on Linux by achieving near line-rate throughput with minimal CPU utilization across transmit, receive, and bidirectional workloads. |
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Chelsio published a paper, Accelerated Inline IPsec Communication with T7, showcasing the seventh-generation Chelsio T7 Unified Wire DPU, which combines high-performance IPsec acceleration with exceptional CPU efficiency across varying traffic workloads. |
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Chelsio published the IDC Analyst Brief that examines how Data Processing Units (DPUs) are transforming modern data center architectures, enabling offload and acceleration across AI networking, storage, security, virtualization, and edge workloads. |
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Chelsio published a paper, 400G kTLS/SSL Offload and Encryption with FreeBSD, highlighting how the Chelsio S7 SmartNIC achieves an impressive 395 Gbps kTLS/SSL offload capability on AMD Turin systems. |
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Chelsio published a paper, AI Networking Solution: Chelsio T7 DPU and S7/T6 SmartNICs, highlighting how Chelsio is driving AI networking innovation through its advanced T7 DPU and S7/T6 SmartNIC product portfolio. |
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Chelsio published a paper, Chelsio T7 Performance Analysis on Linux for 400GbE Networking in a Multi-Client Setup, highlighting how T7 adapters consistently deliver high throughput on Linux. |
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Chelsio published a paper, High-Performance NIC Optimization on Linux With Chelsio T7, highlighting how the T7 adapter family offers advanced hardware acceleration, offload capabilities, and scalable throughput to meet the demands of modern workloads. |
Recent Videos and Webinars
In the Wild
Case Studies
Learn More
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See a complete list of recent Chelsio newsletters
here. |
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See a complete list of recent Chelsio white papers
here. |
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See a complete list of Chelsio performance reports
here. |
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See a complete list of Competitive Analysis reports
here. |
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See a complete list of Case Studies here. |
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See a complete list of Videos here. |
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See a complete list of Webinars here. |
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See a complete list of Blogs here. |
Remember to follow us on X @chelsio1
How to Order?
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Chelsio Adapters and Accessories can now be ordered from the following Webstores:
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Latest Software and Drivers
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Chelsio Unified Wire v4.2.0.8 for Linux |
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Chelsio Unified Boot Option ROM and Flash Utility v3.0.0.10 |
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Chelsio ARM v1.0.0.7 |
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Chelsio T7 TLS 1.3/1.2 kTLS Inbox Driver in FreeBSD 16.0 |
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Chelsio T7 NVMe/TCP Initiator and Target PDU Offload Inbox Driver in FreeBSD 16.0 |
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Chelsio Unified Wire v5.3.0.35 for VMware ESXi 8.0 |
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Chelsio Unified Wire InstallShield v6.16.23.0_WIN_006.0.114 for Windows |
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Unified Storage Server (USS) v4.0 (Build 73) |
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Network Driver v1.25.1 for macOS 15 (Sequoia) |
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Chelsio Products
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Chelsio Product Briefs
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Resources
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