Nvidia has announced the Spectrum-X and Quantum-X silicon photonics networking switches, which they claim lower power consumption and improve deployment speeds.
Compared to undisclosed 'traditional methods,' the company promises 3.5x more power efficiency, 63x greater signal integrity, 10x better network resiliency 'at scale,' and 1.3x faster deployment. It provided no benchmarks for its claims.
The photonics use a new technology called 'micro ring modulators.'
“AI factories are a new class of data centers with extreme scale, and networking infrastructure must be reinvented to keep pace,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
“By integrating silicon photonics directly into switches, Nvidia is shattering the old limitations of hyperscale and enterprise networks and opening the gate to million-GPU AI factories.”
The Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform includes multiple photonics configurations, including 128 ports of 800Gb/s or 512 ports of 200Gb/s, delivering 100Tb/s total bandwidth, as well as 512 ports of 800Gb/s or 2,048 ports of 200Gb/s, for a total throughput of 400Tb/s.
The Quantum-X Photonics switches provide 144 ports of 800Gb/s InfiniBand based on 200Gb/s SerDes and use a liquid-cooled design. Quantum-X Photonics switches offer 2x faster speeds and 5x higher scalability for AI compute fabrics compared with the previous generation, the company said.
The company's silicon photonics ecosystem includes TSMC, Browave, Coherent, Corning, Fabrinet, Foxconn, Lumentum, SENKO, SPIL, Sumitomo Electric Industries, and TFC Communication.
“A new wave of AI factories requires efficiency and minimal maintenance to achieve the scale required for next-generation workloads,” said C. C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC.
“TSMC’s silicon photonics solution combines our strengths in both cutting-edge chip manufacturing and TSMC-SoIC 3D chip stacking to help Nvidia unlock an AI factory’s ability to scale to a million GPUs and beyond, pushing the boundaries of AI.”
Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand switches are expected to be available later this year, with Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet switches coming in 2026.
