Nvidia opens up speedy NVLink interconnect to custom CPUs, ASICs

Computex Nvidia has opened the NVLink interconnect tech used to stitch its rack-scale compute platforms together to the broader ecosystem with the introduction of NVLink Fusion at Computex this week.

If you're not familiar, Nvidia's NVLink is a high-speed interconnect which enables multiple GPUs in a system or rack to behave like a single accelerator with shared compute and memory resources.

In its current generation, Nvidia's fifth-gen NVLink fabrics can support up to 1.8 TB/s of bandwidth (900 GB/s in each direction) per GPU for up to 72 GPUs per rack. Until now this interconnect fabric has been limited to Nvidia GPUs and CPUs.

NVLink Fusion means the GPU will allow semi-custom accelerator designs to take advantage of the high-speed interconnect - even for non-Nvidia-designed accelerators.

According to Dion Harris, senior director of HPC, Cloud, and AI at Nvidia, the technology will be offered in ...