Edgecore Unveils 102.4 Tbps AI Datacenter Switch
Edgecore has introduced a new 102.4 Terabits-per-second switch designed for AI datacenter applications. The hardware is intended to handle the massive increase in east-west traffic generated by distributed LLM training, model sharding, and complex inference clusters.
- The new Edgecore switches, models AIS1600-64O and AIS800-128O, are built on Broadcom's latest 3nm Tomahawk 6 ASIC. This chip is the first in the world to deliver 102.4 Tbps of switching capacity on a single device, doubling the bandwidth of the previous generation Tomahawk 5. - The AIS1600-64O is a 3RU switch with 64 ports of 1.6T OSFP1600, while the AIS800-128O is a 4RU system with 128 ports of 800G OSFP800. The high-radix design of the AIS800-128O allows for up to 512 logical ports on a single chip, which helps to flatten network topologies by reducing the number of switch layers, thereby decreasing latency and power consumption. - This level of switching capacity is driven by the need to support massive AI clusters that could exceed 100,000 processing units (XPUs). The industry is seeing a significant shift from proprietary InfiniBand interconnects to open, Ethernet-based fabrics for these large-scale AI deployments. - The Tomahawk 6 silicon incorporates features specifically for AI workloads, such as Cognitive Routing 2.0, which uses network-wide intelligence to dynamically re-route traffic around congestion. It also uses hardware-based link failover and dynamic load balancing to reduce job completion times for long-running AI training tasks. - The move to 102.4 Tbps switching accelerates the adoption of 1.6T optics and also supports co-packaged optics (CPO), which integrates optical engines directly into the switch package to reduce power consumption by up to 70% compared to traditional pluggable modules. - Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 is positioned as a direct competitor to offerings from Nvidia, Marvell, and Cisco, with Broadcom claiming it has double the bandwidth of the nearest competitor. This release continues Broadcom's consistent cadence of doubling switching bandwidth approximately every two years since 2014. - As an open networking platform, Edgecore's switches support a variety of commercial and open-source network operating systems (NOS), such as SONiC, allowing for disaggregation of hardware and software.
