To InfiniBand, maybe beyond?

Nvidia's latest roadmap was teased at Computex in Taiwan last month. Whilst details were a little light on PFLOPS and TDP for either the GPU or CPU, we did get some interesting information for the next-gen products.

• GPU: Rubin (HBM3e to HBM4 memory) - TSMC 3N process
• CPU: Vera (NVIDIA's 2nd gen ARM processor) - TSMC 3N process
• Interconnect: NVLink6 (2x performance to 3600 GB/sec)
• NIC: ConnectX9 (2x speed to 1.6Tb/sec)
• Switch: SpectrumX1600 (2x speed to support CX9 NICs)

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NVIDIA appear to have moved to a tick-tock approach to releases, something Intel famously developed before their own fabs got stuck on 14nm for 6 years (2016 to 2021).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model

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Essentially a new architecture every 2 years, with a process improvement (node reduction, memory upgrade, both/other), they are calling Ultra, squeezed in every other year.??

• For Hopper, the H200 didn't get that nomenclature, however that would essentially be Hopper-Ultra for the memory improvements (141GB memory and 4.8 TB/sec bandwidth).
• For Blackwell, the B200 will be Blackwell-Ultra and increases memory from 8Hi to 12Hi, so expect ~50% more memory and increases to bandwidth again
• For Rubin, that moves to HMB4 and 8Hi memory, Rubin-Ultra increases that to 12Hi, and assume the similar 50% memory capacity, and bandwidth increases again.

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Now, whilst most (including me!) are looking at Rubin and Vera, I noticed something about the networking side of things that doesn't appear to have gotten any coverage.? Let's look at that switch and network card…

SWITCHES

Ethernet - Spectrum-X800 (2024) @ 400G with BlueField3 DPU

Ethernet - Spectrum-X800 Ultra (2025) @ 800G with ConnectX8 NIC

IB/Ethernet - Spectrum-X1600 @ (2026) 1600G with ConnectX9 NIC

That last one is noteworthy.? There's no next-gen Quantum-2 or BlueField3.

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Is NVIDIA converging their InfiniBand and Ethernet switches into one, and abandoning BlueField??

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NETWORK CARDS

What happened to BlueField-3X and 4?

Another piece of the puzzle is that Jensen's presentation doesn't have a roadmap for the BlueField DPU beyond the current BlueField3, announced at GTC in 2021.

A little light research doesn't yield much for a next-gen BlueField, other than what Wikipedia expects (BlueField-4 @ 800G) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_BlueField however this slide from Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome shows that there is/was plans for a BlueField-3X and 4, however the speed was pegged at 400G with 'only' improvements to on-device processing.?

An updated slide from Dec 2023, apparently from NVIDIA, on Wccftech from Dec 2023, pushes BlueField and Quantum updates out to 2H 2024.

Since we're midway through 2024, with an updated presentation sans DPU and dedicated InfiniBand switch, it's possible these have been abandoned for a Spectrum+ConnectX future...

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