My colleague Joe Byrne and I launched a video podcast covering the latest news in the chip world. Episode 1 covers Hot Interconnects and Hot Chips news from August as well as Arm's Lumex announcement and Nvidia's Rubin CPX. We hope you enjoy this new format, which will complement our respective blogs.  

Source: Hot Chips The accelerated life cycles that AI is driving woke up a normally sleepy August. Held virtually, Hot Interconnects (HotI 2025) spanned three days with a mix of invited talks, sponsor talks, and tutorials. Some of the brief sponsor talks merely previewed larger disclosures at Hot Chips, which was held at Stanford University the following week. This year, Hot Chips’ agenda included an Optical session that featured three startups plus Nvidia. It also included Networking and Machine Learning (ML) sessions with talks from leading vendors. Although Nvidia was the marquee name in Hot Chips' Optical session, Gilad Shainer's talk on co-packaged silicon photonics lacked any new technical details on the company's CPO switches. Instead, the company used the event to announce Spectrum-XGS, which extends its Spectrum-X Ethernet solution across data centers. Nvidia calls this "scale-across" networking because it primarily targets data center clusters, but it is...

Source: Broadcom Tomahawk Ultra is a misnomer. Although the name leverages Tomahawk's brand equity, Tomahawk Ultra represents a new architecture. In fact, when it began development, Broadcom's competitive target was InfiniBand. During development, however, AI scale-up interconnects emerged as a critical component of performance scaling, particularly for large language models (LLMs). Through luck or foresight, Tomahawk Ultra suddenly had a new and fast-growing target market. Now, the leading competitor was NVIDIA's NVLink. Also happening in parallel, Broadcom built a multi-billion-dollar business in custom AI accelerators for hyperscalers, most notably Google. At the end of April, Broadcom announced its Scale-Up Ethernet (SUE) framework, which it published and contributed to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Appendix A of the framework includes a latency budget, which allocates less than 250ns to the switch. At the time, we saw this as an impossibly low target for existing Eth...

Tomahawk 6 is First to 102.4T Through relentless execution, Broadcom has been first to market generation after generation in data-center switching. The company just announced sampling of Tomahawk 6 (TH6), its 102.4T Ethernet switch ASIC. This generation actually consists of two switch chips, TH6-200G with 512x200G SerDes, and TH6-100G with 1,024x100G SerDes, both of which are sampling now. A version with fully co-packaged optics, TH6-Davisson, will follow on a to-be-announced schedule.  Whereas Tomahawk 5 (TH5) is a monolithic 5nm chip, TH6 comprises a core die and separate chiplets for the two SerDes options, all of which use 3nm technology. Source: Broadcom For AI scale-out networks, TH6 enables a 128K-XPU network using only two switch tiers. Fewer tiers mean lower latency, simpler load balancing and congestion control, and fewer optics. The new chip is first to handle 1.6T Ethernet ports, but it also handles up to 512x200GbE ports for maximum radix. Beyond sheer port density, TH...

In the AI era, silicon-design cycles have become a limiting factor in feature velocity. Network programmability has never been more critical, yet flexibility cannot come at the cost of performance and power efficiency. With its X-Switch architecture, Xsight Labs targeted the sweet spot for data-center switching, balancing performance and power while maximizing programmability. Now, to encourage innovation and adoption, the company opened the instruction sets for its X-Switch programmable Ethernet switch architecture. Xsight Labs sponsored the creation of this white paper, but the opinions and analysis are those of the author. Download the  white paper  for free, no registration required. X-Switch Scalable Architecture

Yes, $11B in Blackwell revenue is impressive. Yes, Nvidia's data-center revenue grew 93% year over year. Under the surface, however, there's trouble in networking. In the January quarter (Q4 FY25), networking revenue declined 9% year over year and 3% sequentially. In its earnings call, CFO Collette Kress said that Nvidia's networking attach rate was "robust" at more than 75%. Her very next sentence, however, hinted at what's happening underneath that supposed robustness. "We are transitioning from small NVLink8 with InfiniBand to large NVLink72 with Spectrum-X," said Kress. About one year ago, Nvidia positioned InfiniBand for "AI factories" and Spectrum-X for multi-tenant clouds. That positioning collapsed when the company revealed xAI selected Spectrum-X for what is clearly an AI factory. InfiniBand appears to be retreating to its legacy HPC market while Ethernet comes to the fore. Nvidia Data-Center Revenue So how do we square 93% DC grow...

Powering SmartNICs, the data-processing unit (DPU) has become nearly ubiquitous in the leading public clouds. Existing designs maximize power efficiency for a constrained feature set, and they require proprietary software tools. Xsight Labs aims to break this paradigm with its new E1 DPU, which promises the openness of an Arm server CPU. Xsight Labs sponsored the creation of this white paper, but the opinions and analysis are those of the author. Download the white paper for free, no registration required. Xsight E1 DPU