With Tomahawk Ultra, Broadcom asks who needs UALink when there's Ethernet?

Chip vendors like AMD may be closing the gap with Nvidia on GPU FLOPS, memory bandwidth, and HBM capacity, but without a high-speed interconnect and switch, like NVLink and NVSwitch, their ability to scale that performance remains limited.

These technologies have allowed Nvidia to build rack-scale systems with 72 GPUs, while Intel and AMD are still stuck at eight. To get around this limitation, many in the industry have thrown their weight behind the emerging Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) protocol, an open alternative to Nvidia's NVLink.

But not everyone agrees that a new protocol is necessary or is willing to wait for the first UALink hardware to be taped out. Once a founding member of the UALink consortium, Broadcom now believes that Ethernet is more than capable of getting the job done sooner.

"There is a huge benefit to having the same technology for all parts of the network ...