Broadcom's Thor 2 looks to hammer top spot in AI NICs

Broadcom has announced the availability of network interface cards (NICs) for large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) computers. 

Jas Tremblay

The NIC cards are using Broadcom's Thor 2 chip which started sampling in 2023 and is now in volume production.

Jas Tremblay, vice president and general manager of the data center solutions group at Broadcom, says the Thor 2 is the industry's first 400 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) NIC device to be implemented in a 5nm CMOS process.  

"It [the design] gives customers choices and freedom when they're building their AI systems such that they can use different NICs with different [Ethernet] switches," says Tremblay.

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Building an AI supercomputer using silicon photonics

•  Luminous Computing is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer 

Silicon photonics is now mature enough to be used to design complete systems.

So says Michael Hochberg (pictured), who has been behind four start-ups including Luxtera and Elenion whose products used the technology. Hochberg has also co-authored a book along with Lukas Chrostowski on silicon photonics design.

In the first phase of silicon photonics, from 2000 to 2010, people wondered whether they could even do a design using the technology.

“Almost everything that was being done had to fit into an existing socket that could be served by some other material system,” says Hochberg.

A decade later it was more the case that sockets couldn’t be served without using silicon photonics. “Silicon photonics had dominated every one of the transceiver verticals that matter: intra data centre, data centre interconnect, metro and long haul,” he says.

Now people have started betting their systems using silicon photonics, says Hochberg, citing the examples as lidar, quantum optics, co-packaged optics and biosensing.

Several months ago Hochberg joined as president of Luminous Computing, a start-up that recently came out of stealth mode after raising $105 million in Series A funding.

Luminous is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer that it believes will significantly outperform existing platforms.

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Habana Labs unveils its AI processor plans

Start-up Habana Labs has developed a chip architecture that promises to speed up the execution of machine-learning tasks. 

The Israeli start-up came out of secrecy in September to announce two artificial intelligence (AI) processor chips. One, dubbed Gaudi, is designed to tackle the training of large-scale neural networks. The chip will be available in 2019. 

Eitan MedinaGoya, the start-up’s second device, is an inference processor that implements the optimised, trained neural network.

The Goya chip is already in prospective customers’ labs undergoing evaluation, says Eitan Medina, Habana’s chief business officer.

Habana has just raised $75 million in a second round of funding, led by Intel Capital. Overall, the start-up has raised a total of $120 million in funding. 

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