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Ok, so even if the AMD chips are equal to or faster, Nvidia still has a large advantage with their networking using their proprietary NVLink switching that was
by bastard_op 3y ago
Ok, so even if the AMD chips are equal to or faster, Nvidia still has a large advantage with their networking using their proprietary NVLink switching that was most certainly borne from the Mellanox Infiniband IP acquisition. AMD is going to have to rely on more traditional PCI-E based networking for all off-system traffic via Infiniband or Converged Ethernet vs the more optimized Nvidia GPU clustering that uses it's on proprietary super-low latency NVLink-based switching.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/nvlink/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/nvlink/
I'm super curious to see how their networking results compare between transports when real testing results between large supercomputer-ish farms get out there.
- latchkey 3y agoYou obviously didn't watch the announcement. They are doubling down on ethernet and open standards.
- dhruvdh 3y agoAMD uses Infinity Fabric, which is their NVLink. They announced today how they're opening up Infinity Fabric to select partners, including Broadcom. Meaning partners can now develop their own switches. Also, as AMD and HPE power some of the most performant supercomputers in the world, they wouldn't have won those contracts if their networking was subpar. Those use slingshot. You may also be interested in reading about https://ultraethernet.org/ https://ultraethernet.org/ .
- saberience 3y agoNVLink is used for linking chips together, InfiniBand is used for linking systems together, i.e. into big HPC clusters. Infinity Fabric is used for inter chip communication, it's not a replacement for Infiniband and cannot be used to create clusters of machines.
- viewtransform 3y agoI queued for you the part where Forrest Norad explains all this in today's presentation including a discussion on ultrafast ethernet. https://youtu.be/tfSZqjxsr0M?t=5198 https://youtu.be/tfSZqjxsr0M?t=5198
- JonChesterfield 3y agoI think Pensando and Xilinx are the networking story, not pcie. The clusters use Cray's slingshot. Within a node, the x64 cores and GPU units are on a common fabric which is also not pcie.