  As semiconductor power density is no longer constant with the technology
process scaling down, modern CPUs are integrating capable data accelerators on
chip, aiming to improve performance and efficiency for a wide range of
applications and usages. One such accelerator is the Intel Data Streaming
Accelerator (DSA) introduced in Intel 4th Generation Xeon Scalable CPUs
(Sapphire Rapids). DSA targets data movement operations in memory that are
common sources of overhead in datacenter workloads and infrastructure. In
addition, it becomes much more versatile by supporting a wider range of
operations on streaming data, such as CRC32 calculations, delta record
creation/merging, and data integrity field (DIF) operations. This paper sets
out to introduce the latest features supported by DSA, deep-dive into its
versatility, and analyze its throughput benefits through a comprehensive
evaluation. Along with the analysis of its characteristics, and the rich
software ecosystem of DSA, we summarize several insights and guidelines for the
programmer to make the most out of DSA, and use an in-depth case study of DPDK
Vhost to demonstrate how these guidelines benefit a real application.
