<a href="https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/05/30/key-hyperscalers-and-chip-makers-gang-up-on-nvidias-nvswitch-interconnect/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/05/30/key-hyperscalers-and...</a><p><i>"Here’s the funny bit. The UALink 1.0 specification will be done in the third quarter of this year, and that is also when the Ultra Accelerator Consortium will be incorporated to hold the intellectual property and drive the UALink standards. That UALink 1.0 specification will provide a means to connect up to 1,024 accelerators into a shared memory pod. In Q4 of this year, a UALink 1.1 update will come out that pushes up scale and performance even further. It is not clear what transports will be supported by the 1.0 and 1.1 UALink specs, or which ones will support PCI-Express or Ethernet transports.<p>NVSwitch 3 fabrics using NVLink 4 ports could in theory span up to 256 GPUs in a shared memory pod, but only eight GPUs were supported in commercial products from Nvidia. With NVSwitch 4 and NVLink 5 ports, Nvidia can in theory support a pod spanning up to 576 GPUs but in practice commercial support is only being offered on machines with up to 72 GPUs in the DGX B200 NVL72 system."</i>
A bit tangential, but it seems a real shame that Nvidia rather than Intel ended up snapping up Mellanox.<p>Anyway, I hope this works out. Networks shouldn’t be too tied to any particular company I think.