News China debuts ‘Global Scheduling Ethernet’ chip to deliver networking solutions for AI — aims to compete with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium for next...

[Admin]

Chinese tech giants launched chips that enables GSE, an Ethernet standard that allows for high-performance communications between AI servers and HPCs.

China debuts ‘Global Scheduling Ethernet’ chip to deliver networking solutions for AI — aims to compete with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium for next... : Read more

 

[bit_user]

That’s why data centers that use Nvidia GPUs usually use technologies like NVLink to allow their systems to communicate directly. However, NVLink is a proprietary system that only works with Nvidia products, limiting its usefulness and making it costly to deploy.

NVLink is mostly for rack-scale networking and not much beyond that. To scale even larger, you need to use either Infiniband or Ethernet. Spectrum-X seems to be the proprietary alternative to Ultra Ethernet that Nvidia is pushing.

NVIDIA Spectrum-X Networking Platform

The World’s First Ethernet Networking Platform for AI

www.nvidia.com

That said, I also noticed they recently joined the Ultra Ethernet consortium:

Ultra Ethernet Consortium Welcomes 40 New Industry Leaders - Ultra Ethernet Consortium

Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is thrilled to welcome 40 additional companies to the consortium since March 2024. This expansion significantly bolsters our collective expertise and resources, driving us closer to our mission of delivering an Ethernet-based, open and interoperable...

ultraethernet.org

Maybe some of their big customers demanded UE-compliant solutions. In any case, I'd guess Nvidia will still try to lead with their proprietary technology and only support standards compliance at lower speeds equivalent to what other industry players offer.