NVIDIA Quantum-X800 Q3450 CPO Switch
At the top of Gigabyte’s NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, there was an NVIDIA Quantum-X800 co-packaged optics switch. This is the first generation of publicly productized co-packaged optics switches from NVIDIA. You can see the pluggable laser sources at the top, and networking happens via MTP/MPO connections below.
Co-packaged optics reduce power consumption in networking and also lower the number of pluggable components required in a system for on-site installation. We went into this, as well as the Spectrum-X CPO option, using MMC and the “vault” in our Substack.
NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNIC
The next one we saw in Gigabyte’s booth is the NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNIC. This is not just a simple PCIe card. Instead, this is designed with two ConnectX-9 chips and storage built-in and a connector designed for the NVL72 racks.
Here is the connector that allows the card to be serviced through the front of the rack without having to move the card out horizontally like a PCIe card on a riser.
Here is one ConnectX-9 chip.
Here is the other ConnectX-9 chip.
On the connector side, you can see the two optical cages as well as the E1.S SSD slot. If you recall from the front of the NVL72 rack, this was the configuration we saw on either side of the compute nodes.
In the middle of that compute rack, we saw something else, the BlueField-4 DPU.
NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPU
The NVIDIA BlueField line is getting a big bump in this new generation with the introduction of the NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPU.
First, we get the NVIDIA ConnectX-9 NIC for the 800Gbps operation.
Then there is the NVIDIA compute package. This has 64 Arm Neoverse V2 cores, the same generation as today’s NVIDIA Grace CPUs.
There is also 128GB of LPDDR5X memory. That means we went from 16 slower cores and 16GB of memory to 64 cores and 128GB in a single generation.
Here are the pluggable cages, and you can also see a M.2 SSD slot for boot media.
We should note that this is the NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPU for the Vera Rubin NVL72 form factor. There are supposed to be PCIe versions coming as well.
Next, let us take a look at the Gigabyte NVIDIA HGX platforms.
