NVIDIA has made a significant announcement at the GTC event, introducing their latest networking switches, the X800 series, designed for massive-scale AI. The NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and NVIDIA Spectrum-X800 Ethernet are the world’s first networking platforms capable of end-to-end 800Gb/s throughput, pushing the boundaries of networking performance for computing and AI workloads. These switches feature software that accelerates AI, cloud, data processing, and HPC applications in every type of data center, including those that incorporate the newly released NVIDIA Blackwell architecture-based product lineup.
Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA, emphasized the significance of NVIDIA Networking in the scalability of AI supercomputing infrastructure. He stated, “NVIDIA X800 switches are end-to-end networking platforms that enable us to achieve trillion-parameter-scale generative AI essential for new AI infrastructures.”
Initial adopters of Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet include Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Nidhi Chappell, Vice President of AI Infrastructure at Microsoft Azure, highlighted the increasing demands for networking infrastructure in high-performance AI engines and expressed Microsoft Azure’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of cloud AI through new integrations of NVIDIA networking solutions.
The Quantum-X800 platform sets a new standard in delivering the highest performance for AI-dedicated Infrastructure. It includes the NVIDIA Quantum Q3400 switch and the NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNIC, achieving an industry-leading end-to-end throughput of 800Gb/s, 5x higher bandwidth capacity, and a 9x increase of 14.4Tflops of In-Network Computing with NVIDIA’s Scalable Hierarchical Aggregation and Reduction Protocol (SHARPv4) compared to the previous generation.
The Spectrum-X800 platform, on the other hand, delivers optimized networking performance for AI cloud and enterprise infrastructure. Utilizing the Spectrum SN5600 800Gb/s switch and the NVIDIA BlueField-3 SuperNIC, the Spectrum-X800 platform provides advanced feature sets crucial for multi-tenant generative AI clouds and large enterprises.
