The necessity for unified networks serving synthetic intelligence (AI) coaching and inference is reaching an unprecedented scale. Broadcom’s reply: The Tomahawk 6 change delivers 102.4 Tbs of switching capability in a single chip, doubling the bandwidth of any Ethernet change presently accessible in the marketplace.
AI clusters—scaling from tens to hundreds of accelerators—are turning the community right into a important bottleneck with bandwidth and latency as main limitations. Tomahawk 6, boasting 100G/200G SerDes and co-packaged optics (CPO) expertise, breaks the 100-Tbps barrier whereas facilitating a versatile path to the subsequent wave of AI infrastructure.
Determine 1 Tomahawk 6’s two-tier community construction, as a substitute of a three-tier community, results in fewer optics, decrease latency, and better reliability. Supply: Broadcom
Ram Velaga, senior VP and GM of Core Switching Group at Broadcom, calls Tomahawk 6 not simply an improve however a breakthrough. “It marks a turning level in AI infrastructure design, combining the very best bandwidth, energy effectivity, and adaptive routing options for scale-up and scale-out networks into one platform.”
First, the Tomahawk 6 household of switches contains an possibility for 1,024 100G SerDes on a single chip, permitting designers to deploy AI clusters with prolonged copper attain. Furthermore, Broadcom’s 200G SerDes gives the longest attain for passive copper interconnect, facilitating high-efficiency, low-latency system design with larger reliability, and decrease whole value of possession (TCO).
Second, Tomahawk 6 can also be accessible with co-packaged optics, which lowers energy and latency whereas lowering hyperlink flaps. Tomahawk 6’s CPO answer is constructed upon Broadcom’s CPO variations of Tomahawk 4 and Tomahawk 5.
Third, Tomahawk 6 incorporates superior AI routing capabilities that embody options like superior telemetry, dynamic congestion management, speedy failure detection, and packet trimming. These options allow world load balancing and adaptive circulate management whereas supporting fashionable AI workloads, together with mixture-of-experts, fine-tuning, reinforcement studying, and reasoning fashions.
Determine 2 Cognitive Routing 2.0 in Tomahawk 6 options superior telemetry, dynamic congestion management, speedy failure detection, and packet trimming. Supply: Broadcom
The capabilities outlined above present important benefits for hyperscale AI community operators. In addition they enable cloud operators to dynamically partition their XPU property into the optimum configuration for various AI workloads. Broadcom claims that Tomahawk 6 meets all networking calls for for rising 100,000 to 1 million XPU clusters.
Determine 3 Tomahawk 6 can accommodate as much as 512 XPUs in a scale-op cluster. Supply: Broadcom
Whereas Tomahawk 5 has confirmed itself in massive GPU clusters, Tomahawk 6 takes it a step additional when it comes to bandwidth, SerDes velocity and density, load balancing, and telemetry. Tomahawk 6, compliant with the Extremely Ethernet Consortium, additionally helps arbitrary community topologies, together with scale-up, Clos, rail-only, rail-optimized, and torus.
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