SmartNIC
A network card that can be programmed to do part of the packet processing itself instead of merely delivering bytes to the processor.
An ordinary card has long offloaded simple things like checksums and segmentation. A smart one takes whole functions: the virtual switch's flow tables, TLS termination, RDMA, firewall rules, compression. Implementations fall into three families — fixed ASICs that are fastest but only do what they do, FPGA-based cards that can be reprogrammed into whatever the datacenter happens to need, and SoC-based ones with general-purpose cores that are easiest to develop against. That last category is in practice what gets marketed as a DPU. The gain is measured in freed host cores and in lower tail latency, since the packet skips the trip through host memory and interrupt handling.