The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) has delayed the release of version 1.0 of the specification from Q3 2024 to Q1 2025, but it appears that AMD is ready to announce a true network interface card for AI data centers that is ready to be deployed in Ultra Ethernet data centers. The new unit is the AMD Pensando Pollara 400, which promises up to a six-fold performance increase for AI workloads.

The AMD Pensando Pollara 400 is a 400GbE Ultra Ethernet card based on a processor designed by the company’s Pensando unit. The network processor features a programmable hardware pipeline, programmable RDMA transport, programmable congestion control, and communications library acceleration. The NIC will be sampled in the fourth quarter and will be commercially available in the first half of 2025, shortly after the Ultra Ethernet Consortium formally publishes the UEC 1.0 specification.

The AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI NIC is designed to optimize AI and HPC networks through several advanced capabilities. One of its key features is intelligent multipath, which dynamically distributes data packets across optimal paths, avoiding network congestion and improving overall efficiency. The NIC also includes path-aware congestion control, which reroutes data away from temporarily congested paths to ensure a continuous flow of high-speed data.

Pollara 400 is an innovative solution that offers fast failover, meaning it can detect and prevent network failures very quickly and effectively. This ensures that communication between graphics processing units (GPUs) remains uninterrupted, which is crucial for applications that require high performance and continuous availability. By ensuring seamless GPU-to-GPU communication, Pollara 400 provides robust performance, while optimizing the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) clusters and minimizing latency that could negatively impact data processing.

These advanced features of Pollara 400 are particularly promising, as they have the potential to significantly improve the scalability and reliability of AI infrastructure. This makes the solution ideal for large-scale deployments, where efficiency and service continuity are of paramount importance.

In parallel, the growth of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium reflects the interest and expansion in the development of advanced networking technologies. With 97 members, a significant increase compared to the 55 in March 2024, the consortium is working on the UEC 1.0 specification. This specification aims to scale Ethernet technology, which is ubiquitous in terms of performance and features, to meet the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

The new UEC 1.0 specification will benefit from reusing as much of the original Ethernet technology as possible. This not only ensures cost-effective development and deployment of new technologies, but also guarantees interoperability with existing infrastructures, which is crucial for smooth market adoption.

In addition, the UEC 1.0 specification will include distinct profiles for AI and HPC. While these types of workloads share a number of similarities, they also have significant differences in their needs and characteristics. Therefore, to maximize the efficiency of each, separate protocols will be developed that specifically fit the unique requirements of AI and HPC. This will enable organizations to get the most out of their IT infrastructures, optimizing performance and ensuring that solutions are suitable for a wide range of applications and scenarios.