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> An interesting aspect of Intel's design is they use Ethernet for connectivity. Interestingly, tenstorrent is doing something similar with their wormhole card
by latchkey 3y ago
> An interesting aspect of Intel's design is they use Ethernet for connectivity.
Interestingly, tenstorrent is doing something similar with their wormhole cards.
I'm not convinced yet that it is the right way to go. If the switching fabric on the card fails, you lose the whole card. Keeping it separated out is a bit less risky, at the cost of some speed.
I'm more partial to composable fabrics, but they aren't ready yet for PCIe5 and we have PCIe6 just around the corner next year.
- wmf 3y agoYou want each ASIC to have 24 external NICs (so 192 NICs for a server?) with all the cabling/backplanes that would require?
- latchkey 3y agoThey are 24x200G, which is already outdated. Everything we are doing is currently 400G (via 8xCX7 cards running in ethernet mode) and 800G at the spine. 800G NICs, which will come with PCIe6 next year and cuts the number of connections down. What I'd prefer is the connection is through the UBB/OAM baseboard, such that you have PCIe connections. Look into what GigaIO and Liqid are doing. There is a 3rd option that is even cooler than those two, but I don't want to mention it here. ;-)