Broadcom made the introduction of a new chip which capable to wire together supercomputers for artificial intelligence (AI). This launch will work for the utilization of networking technology that is already in wide usage.
Broadcom is one of the major supplier of chips for Ethernet switches. This is one of the primary ways of connecting the computers inside conventional data centres to one another.
But with the rise of AI applications that are inclusive of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Alphabet’s Bard has presented new challenges for the networks that are inherited within the data centres. For responding to the questions with human-like answers, these kinds of systems must be trained with the utilization of huge amounts of data.
One computer chip is incapable to handle this huge data. The job must be split over thousands of chips which are graphics processing units (GPUs). These graphics processing units function like one giant computer to work on the job for weeks or even months at a time.
Broadcom released a new chip, Jericho3-AI that has the capability to connect up to 32,000 GPU chips together. The Jericho3-AI chip will compete with another supercomputer networking technology which is termed InfiniBand.
The biggest maker of InfiniBand gear is now Nvidia. Nvidia purchased InfiniBand leader Mellanox for $6.9 billion in the year 2019.
Nvidia is considered the major market leader in GPUs. Nvidia-Mellanox systems are categorized as the fastest supercomputers in the world. Over the globe, there are various companies that are reluctant to give up Ethernet, which is sold by a variety of companies to buy both their GPUs and networking gear. The statement has been mentioned by Ram Velaga, who is the senior vice president and general manager of the core switching group at Broadcom.
Ram Velaga also mentioned that the ethernet, one can get from multiple vendors. In the existing market, there is a lot of competition. If one doesn’t come out with the best Ethernet switch, somebody else will get the one.
