Astera speaks softly and carries a big switch
High-speed connectivity without NVLink baggage
Astera Labs unveiled an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for building rack-scale AI systems on Tuesday, claiming it will work with nearly any accelerator.
The AI fabric switch, codenamed Scorpio X, crams 320 lanes of PCIe 6.0 connectivity into a single ASIC with 5.12 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth.
Historically, PCIe switches have been used in a variety of applications including scale-out compute fabrics. CPUs alone either didn't offer enough or fast enough lanes for all the GPUs, NICs, and storage required. So, rather than hanging everything off the CPU, a PCIe switch, often built into the NIC, was used to connect everything together.
Astera contends that with a big enough switch, PCIe is a viable alternative to interconnects like NVLink, in the scale-up fabricsused to make dozens or more GPUs behave more like a single large one without needing to redesign their...
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