This system where "SIMO controllers are qualified" was mentioned in the NVDA conference call (below). It's something called "Bluefield".
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We now have three networking platforms, maybe four. The first one is the scale-up platform to turn a computer into a much larger computer. Scaling up is incredibly hard to do. Scaling out is easier to do, but scaling up is hard to do. And that platform is called NVLink. NVLink is -- comes with it chips and switches and NVLink Spines and it's really complicated. But anyway, that's our new platform, scale-up platform.
In addition to InfiniBand, we also have Spectrum-X. We've been fairly consistent that Ethernet was designed for a lot of traffic that are independent, but in the case of AI, you have a lot of computers working together.
And the traffic of AI is insanely bursty. Latency matters a lot because the AI is thinking and it wants to get work done as quickly as possible, and you got a whole bunch of nodes working together.
And so, we enhanced Ethernet, added capabilities like extremely low latency, congestion control, adaptive routing, the type of technologies that were available only in InfiniBand to Ethernet. And as a result, we improved the utilization of Ethernet in these clusters. These clusters are gigantic, from as low as 50% to as high as 85%, 90%.
And so, the difference is if you had a cluster that's $10 billion, and you improve its effectiveness by 40%, that's worth $4 billion. It's incredible. And so, Spectrum-X has been really, quite frankly, a home run. And this last quarter, as we said in the prepared remarks, we added two very significant CSPs to the Spectrum-X adoption.
And then the last one is Blue Field, which is our control plane. And so, in those four -- the control plane of network, which is used for storage, it's used for security, and for many of these clusters that want to achieve isolation among its users, multi-tenant clusters and still be able to use and have extremely high-performance bare metal performance, Blue Field is ideal for that and is used in a lot of these cases.
And so, we have these four networking platforms that are all growing and we're doing really well. I'm very proud of the team. |
