[1] The first Nvidia produced BlueField cards, named BlueField-2, were shipped for review shortly after their announcement at VMworld 2019, and were officially launched at GTC 2020.
[4] BlueField cards differ from network interface controllers in their offloading of functions that would normally be reserved for the CPU, and the presence of CPU cores (typically ARM or MIPS based) and memory support (typically DDR4, though Bluefield-3's release brought support for more exotic memory types such as HBM and DDR5).
BlueField cards also run an operating system completely independent from the host system: this is designed to reduce software overhead, as each DPU can function independently of one another and the head unit.
[5] This also means that Bluefield cards are capable of allowing remote management of systems that may not typically support it.
These cards are intended for high power GPU clusters to allow high bandwidth communication without needing to cross the PCIe bus and create an unnecessary load on the CPU where performance may be better allocated to other types of processing.