Does AI give InfiniBand a moment to shine? Or will Ethernet hold the line?

Growing demand for AI will see the datacenter switching market grow by 50 percent, according to Dell'Oro analyst Sameh Boujelbene, who has also predicted considerable innovation in the switching arena. Boujelbene estimates that AI systems currently account for "significantly less than 10 percent" of the total addressable …

[luis river]

TO POINT OUT

Well the fierce competition between thats techs now, but this article up write by The Register dont speak about saving cost from Ethernet and ancient application compatibility, I believe than differences characteristic of both tech on the future will be cuasi similar, but... Infiniband never beat Ethernet in some standar tech !!

[ChoHag]

Railways don't have no collisions, but when they do occur they're much, much worse.

[luis river]

EXTEND to point out

Railways...certainly but rapid spacecraft plenty of passangers, if drop...dont save no-one.

[cmac]

UltraEthernet Forum

Might want to consider that Microsoft, Meta, etc. are part of the UltraEthernet forum, specifically to enhance Ethernet for AI (and avoid the use of Infiniband)

[Anonymous Coward]

Inaccurate numbers

> Nvidia's latest Quantum InfiniBand switches top out at 25.6 Tb/s and 400 Gb/s ports

Mmmh, no: the latest NDR switches have a switching capacity of 51.2TB/s. See the specs at https://nvdam.widen.net/s/k8sqcr6gzb/infiniband-quantum-2-qm9700-series-datasheet-us-nvidia-1751454-r8-web

[Anonymous Coward]

What about an all PCIe network..?

Besides the store and forward networks like Ethernet and IB, PCIe-based interconnects like GigaIO FabreX memory fabric are set to power large scale GPU clouds like TensorWave and others. Ultra low latency, one memory space, no vendor lock-in as far as accelerator brand, and “inbuild reliable transport mechanism” are some of the features that cause AI customers to look beyond Ethernet and InfiniBand.