Broadcom has released a new chip for wiring together supercomputers for artificial intelligence work using networking technology that is already in wide use. The newly announced chip, Jericho3-AI can connect up to 32,000 GPU chips together.
Broadcom is a major supplier of chips for Ethernet switches, which are the primary way computers inside conventional data centres are connected to one another. The rise of AI applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc's Bard have presented new challenges for the networks inside data centres. In order to respond to questions with human-like answers, such systems must be trained using huge amounts of data.
The job of training these systems must be split up over thousands of chips called graphics processing units (GPUs), which then have to function like one giant computer to work on the job for weeks or even months at a time. That makes the speed at which the individual chips can communicate important.
The Jericho3-AI chip will compete with another supercomputer networking technology InfiniBand. The biggest maker for InfiniBand gear is Nvidia, which purchased InfiniBand leader Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2019.
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