After a five-year hiatus, Cornelis' interconnect returns at 400Gbps, with Ethernet support next

Five years after Intel spun off its Omni-Path interconnect tech into Cornelis Networks, its 400Gbps CN5000 line of switches and NICs is finally ready to do battle with its long-time rival, Nvidia's InfiniBand.

This time around, Cornelis isn't just going after supercomputers and HPC clusters. It's looking to get in on the AI boom as well by undercutting Nvidia on price performance.

For those who thought Omni-Path was dead and brain-dumped all memories of it, here's a quick refresher. Initially developed by Intel in 2015, Omni-Path is a lossless interconnect technology, similar in many respects to Nvidia's InfiniBand networking, aimed at high-performance compute applications.

The first Omni-Path switches offered 4.8Tbps of bandwidth across 48 100Gbps ports, and saw deployment in a number of supercomputing platforms, like the Los Alamos National Lab's Trinity system and the Department of Energy's Cori machine.

However, by ...