News AMD unveils industry's first Ultra Ethernet ready network card for AI and HPC

[Admin]

AMD reveals Prensando Pollara 400: world's first Ultra Ethernet Consortium 1.0 specification ready network card.

AMD unveils industry's first Ultra Ethernet ready network card for AI and HPC : Read more

 

[Jame5]

So we are just going the route of consumer wifi routers? Releasing products before the spec is finalized?

 

[CaptRiker]

400 Gbit? ouch.. is that over fibre? seems rj 45 cables would ne to be really really short lol

 

[dimar]

Any advantages for using Ultra Ethernet in consumer PCs?

 

[coolestcarl]

Any advantages for using Ultra Ethernet in consumer PCs?

Yes, beautiful, beautiful, high-speed backups and media transfer for NAS.

 

[Nikolay Mihaylov]

400 Gbit? ouch.. is that over fibre? seems rj 45 cables would ne to be really really short lol

Of course it is over fibre. RJ45 only goes up to 10Gbps. I think there are specs for 25 and 40 Gbps over TP cable (cat 7 and 8?) but I am not aware of any implementation. There are high speed copper cables, at least up to 100Gbps of the QSFP28 DAC variety but these are a different beast and have always been pretty short to begin with.

BTW, fibre is relatively cheap. It's the transceivers that are expensive.

 

[AkroZ]

Yes, beautiful, beautiful, high-speed backups and media transfer for NAS.

For that you need a NAS able to write/read data at 400Gbps. As best NVME disks are around 120Gbps, with 4 disks in raid it's doable. But a motherboard with 4 disks with PCIe Gen 5 and the network card is costly.

 

[das_stig]

Yes, beautiful, beautiful, high-speed backups and media transfer for NAS.

Windows and all your home appliance's can finally have all the bandwidth they need to report home and ensure your tracked, categorised and targeted efficiently.

 

[JAMESDWI]

For that you need a NAS able to write/read data at 400Gbps. As best NVME disks are around 120Gbps, with 4 disks in raid it's doable. But a motherboard with 4 disks with PCIe Gen 5 and the network card is costly.

This just leaves me with a couple questions, with 4x 60TB SSD's that can handle enough data from such a network, it sounds cool, but what do you do after the first 5 minutes, when your 4 SSD drives are now full? Where does the data go? Where are you going to get your next 240TB of data to process. Not like you are going to get a 400 gigabit link to the internet that won't cost more than your house is worth, each month.

Next question is. given that a 60TB SSD drive is around $16,000 I know they exist but no one is providing a quote, so estimating based on the price of 15TB SSD drives. Where do you find your next $64,000 to double the size of your NAS/SAN system, now this doesn't account for the cost of expanding the size of the current NAS just drives to do it.

 

[Samlebon2306]

Any advantages for using Ultra Ethernet in consumer PCs?

You absolutely need it to watch 128K movies at 500 fps.

 

[hotaru251]

Pensando Pollara....

please tech industry start using short simple names for your stuff... "Pensando Pollara" is just long and wtf for no reason.
Just call it the AMD UE (Ultra Ethernet) 1G400 (1st gen 400Gb speed).

 

[bit_user]

This just leaves me with a couple questions, with 4x 60TB SSD's that can handle enough data from such a network, it sounds cool, but what do you do after the first 5 minutes, when your 4 SSD drives are now full? Where does the data go?

You're doing it wrong. What you're supposed to do is have a dual-CPU server with a couple hundred cores and a bunch of guest VMs running on them. Those VMs all want to access some data, but because those VMs can spin up on different hosts from time to time, the data won't be local. Instead, the data is located across a large array of storage servers. VMs not only need regular storage I/O, they also need to talk with other VMs in the datacenter, or even to communicate with clients over the internet. Another big consumer of I/O bandwidth is reading & writing VM snapshots, which you want to be fast, because the VM can't run until the snapshot finishes.

So, the case for 400 Gbps is really to handle the spikes in network traffic and because transferring lots of data (like VM snapshots) takes time, which you want to minimize, because time is latency and latency is $$$.

Oh, and we didn't even get into AI, but multi-machine AI training is probably one of the main use cases.

Next question is. given that a 60TB SSD drive is around $16,000 I know they exist but no one is providing a quote, so estimating based on the price of 15TB SSD drives.

Here's one.

https://www.provantage.com/solidigm-sbfpf2bv614top1~7SLDG04M.htm
​

I just saved you over $8k!
: D

 

[bit_user]

Pensando Pollara....

please tech industry start using short simple names for your stuff... "Pensando Pollara" is just long and wtf for no reason.
Just call it the AMD UE (Ultra Ethernet) 1G400 (1st gen 400Gb speed).

Quit whinging. Pensando is a company AMD bought 2 years ago. They have to keep it in the name, so that customers understand it's a continuation of their product line.

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/pensando-acquisition.html
​

Perhaps that acquisition can be seen in a similar vein to Nvidia's acquisition of Mellanox, about 2-3 years before that. Nvidia is using Mellanox to scale multi-GPU clusters beyond rack-scale. Presumably, AMD has similar ambitions.

So we are just going the route of consumer wifi routers? Releasing products before the spec is finalized?

They probably know enough about what parts of the spec are still up in the air that they can subsequently achieve conformance via firmware updates. In the meantime, they probably have customers chomping at the bit for that sweet performance, even if the cards only offer limited compatibility.

 

[hotaru251]

Quit whinging. Pensando is a company AMD bought 2 years ago. They have to keep it in the name, so that customers understand it's a continuation of their product line.

....then name it the Pensando UE....
Having product names that make sense isn't hard.

 

[bit_user]

....then name it the Pensando UE....

Why do you think they would have just one Ultra Ethernet product? Pensando had/has multiple product lines, each with their own name - DPUs, smart NICs, Ethernet adapters, chipsets, software, etc. Some of the other products they make could eventually support Ultra Ethernet, as well. So, that wouldn't be a good name for this line of DPUs.

Having product names that make sense isn't hard.

I don't think you've cleared that bar. You're clearly talking about something without a clue. Try at least reading about their entire product portfolio, first.

 

[jp7189]

Any advantages for using Ultra Ethernet in consumer PCs?

Considering that's faster than the connection to your local SSD, there's no longer a reason to have local storage. One storage box for the house with a bunch of disk less computers for the family.

Seriously though, it's so overkill for any conceivable consumer application that it's a pointless line of thought.

 

[domih]

Ah... The Ethernet buzzwords vs. Infiniband fight goes on and on.

 

[bit_user]

Seriously though, it's so overkill for any conceivable consumer application that it's a pointless line of thought.

There are lots of overkill projects and thought experiments that fall under the category of "hold my beer..."

I think it's a fair question to ask what conceivable benefit could be derived from so much bandwidth, in a prosumer or pro-gamer context. I agree with your conclusion, however. I'm unable to dream up anything that's not highly contrived and better accomplished by some more conventional means.

 

[jp7189]

There are lots of overkill projects and thought experiments that fall under the category of "hold my beer..."

I think it's a fair question to ask what conceivable benefit could be derived from so much bandwidth, in a prosumer or pro-gamer context. I agree with your conclusion, however. I'm unable to dream up anything that's not highly contrived and better accomplished by some more conventional means.

Alright, I'll take a trip down hold my beer lane. A used Nexus 9336c with 36x 100G ports is now firmly under $2k. Which isn't that far off a consumer 10G switch. The difference between used 100G PCIe cards isn't that far off consumer 10G cards either. Just ignore SFPs and cabling, and ya know a pair of 1100watt power supplies and a bank of insane RPM 1U counter rotating fans which make princess Vespa's hairdryer sound quiet by comparison.