Friday, December 1st 2023
Ethernet Switch Chips are Now Infected with AI: Broadcom Announces Trident 5-X12
Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic this year, and everything is now an AI processor, from CPUs to GPUs, NPUs, and many others. However, it was only a matter of time before we saw an integration of AI processing elements into the networking chips. Today, Broadcom announced its new Ethernet switching silicon called Trident 5-X12. The Trident 5-X12 delivers 16 Tb/s of bandwidth, double that of the previous Trident generation while adding support for fast 800G ports for connection to Tomahawk 5 spine switch chips. The 5-X12 is software-upgradable and optimized for dense 1RU top-of-rack designs, enabling configurations with up to 48x200G downstream server ports and 8x800G upstream fabric ports. The 800G support is added using 100G-PAM4 SerDes, which enables up to 4 m DAC and linear optics.
However, this is not only a switch chip on its own. Broadcom has added AI processing elements in an inference engine called NetGNT (Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer). It can detect common traffic patterns and optimize data movement across the chip. Specifically, the company has listed an example of the system doing AI/ML workloads. In that case, NetGNT performs intelligent traffic analysis to avoid network congestion in these workloads. For example, it can detect the so-called "incast" patterns in real-time, where many flows converge simultaneously on the same port. By recognizing the start of incast early, NetGNT can invoke hardware-based congestion control techniques to prevent performance degradation without added latency.
Source:
Broadcom
However, this is not only a switch chip on its own. Broadcom has added AI processing elements in an inference engine called NetGNT (Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer). It can detect common traffic patterns and optimize data movement across the chip. Specifically, the company has listed an example of the system doing AI/ML workloads. In that case, NetGNT performs intelligent traffic analysis to avoid network congestion in these workloads. For example, it can detect the so-called "incast" patterns in real-time, where many flows converge simultaneously on the same port. By recognizing the start of incast early, NetGNT can invoke hardware-based congestion control techniques to prevent performance degradation without added latency.
37 Comments on Ethernet Switch Chips are Now Infected with AI: Broadcom Announces Trident 5-X12
Beat THAT press release Broadcom.
AI better kill me quick, I'm not having it. Even the behind the scenes routines get shut down. I'm not interested in AI trained by someone else looking through my digital life and offering suggestions or help.Our Bidet is a $1200 dog watering device. Seriously, I put a $600 faucet kit in to update it and we use it to give the dogs water.
networking should be KISS, the less you put on the switches the better
"Learning" tech is impossible since they'd need local storage to record the things they've learned and no one would ever allow that because that could contain sensitive data, so the use of AI is really misleading.
What they mean is