Broadcom unveils Tomahawk 5 chip to unlock the AI network

With RDMA over Converged Ethernet, or RoCE, ethernet switching is ready to replace InfiniBand as an interconnect for GPUs, says ethernet switch chip vendor Broadcom.

Broadcom 2022

For some time now, specialists in the area of computer networking have been talking about a second network. The usual network is the one that connects client computers to servers, the LAN. The rise of artificial intelligence has created a network "behind" that network, a "scale-out" network to run AI tasks such as deep learning programs that must be trained on thousands of GPUs.

That has led to what switch silicon vendor Broadcom describes as a critical impasse. Nvidia, the dominant vendor of the GPU chips running deep learning, is also becoming the dominant vendor of networking technology to interconnect the chips, using the InfiniBand technology that it added when it acquired Mellanox in 2020.

The danger, some suggest, is that everything is tied up with one company, with no diversification and no way to build a data center where many chips compete. 

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"What Nvidia is doing, is saying, I can sell a GPU for a couple thousand dollars, or I can sell an equivalent to an integrated system for half a million to a million-plus dollars," said Ram Velaga, the senior vice president and general manager of the Core Switching Group at networking chip giant Broadcom, in an interview with ZDNet.

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