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.

Valve's Steamworks Development team has reaffirmed, in an announcement earlier on this week, that the company is committed to protecting the privacy of its userbase: "Steam will continue to not share personally identifiable information. This approach to privacy means that some trade-offs have been made along the way that limits how specific some reporting can be. In most cases, it simply means that any traffic sources that are below a threshold of volume will get reported as "other". We intentionally don't collect or store demographic information about users such as age, gender, or race."

Valve has decided to drop its usage of Google Analytics as part of Steam's traffic monitoring package: "As of this coming July, Google will no longer operate Universal Analytics (UA), which is a third-party traffic reporting system that we've had available for measuring traffic sources to Steam store pages. Their announced replacement will be a system called Google Analytics 4 (GA4). You can read Google's help article about the topic." Valve has chosen to develop their own system instead of upgrading to the latest version of third-party software: "As time has gone on we've come to realize that Google's tracking solutions don't align well with our approach to customer privacy, and so with the migration to GA4 we've made the decision to end our support of Google's analytics systems on Steam. Instead, we're focused on building the most useful parts of aggregated reporting into Steam itself, as described above."

I had to take that sentence from Game of Thrones' Little Finger (if you recognized it, kudos to you), since I believe it to be mostly true, given we have the right mindset about that which surrounds us. While the pandemic will always be a mainly bleak point in humanity's history, and everyday there are reports of people being their worst selves through these difficult times, there is also always opportunity for growth affixed to any great crisis. It falls upon us, our institutions, and on companies, to see really what we can learn from situations such as these.

For one, we've seen, beyond any possible ideological beliefs we may have, that the Internet is a utility, not a commodity. Its capability to bridge the gaps in geography - and in social connection - is just too important in our globalized society to be considered anything other than a fundamental right. Discussions on this point have been ongoing for a while, and debates surrounding things like the net neutrality have already given birth to rivers of both actual and digital ink. However, it is this writer's opinion that the discussion is moot, and nothing more than a speedbump until we achieve the final, inescapable truth that the Internet is a crucial part of the world's infrastructure, and not only that - of what it means to be human in our modern world.