Features And Benefits - Mellanox Technologies ConnectX-4 Lx User Manual

Features and Benefits

1.2

This section describes hardware features and capabilities. Please refer to the relevant driver and/or firmware
release notes for feature availability.
Feature
PCI Express (PCIe)
Up to 50 Gigabit Ethernet
Memory
Overlay Networks
RDMA and RDMA over Converged
Ethernet (RoCE)
11
Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) through an x8 edge connector. Gen 1.1 and
2.0 compatible.
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:
• 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE
• IEEE 802.3by, Ethernet Consortium25, 50 Gigabit Ethernet,
supporting all FEC modes
• IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
• IEEE 802.3by 25 Gigabit Ethernet
• IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation and KR startup
• Proprietary Ethernet protocols (20/40GBASE-R2, 50GBASE-R4)
• 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)
• PCI Express - stores and accesses Ethernet fabric connection
information and packet data.
• SPI - includes one 16MB SPI Flash device (W25Q128FVSIG
device by WINBOND-NUVOTON).
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.
ConnectX-4 Lx, utilizing IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access)
and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technology, delivers low-
latency and high-performance over Band and 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.
Description
Mellanox Technologies