NVIDIA unveiled its next generation, 400 Gbps Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch with adaptive routing and enhanced congestion control mechanisms.
The NVIDIA Spectrum-4 uses a custom ASIC with a 51.2 terabits per second switching capacity, supporting up 128 ports of 400G or 64 ports of 800G, and based on 100 Gbps PAM4 SerDes technology. It integrates a 12.8 Tb/s crypto engine wtih support for MACsec and VXLANsec. It also support secure boot as default via hardware root of trust .
NVIDIA Spectrum-4 features a fully-shared and monolithic packet buffer that’s dynamically available to all ports. This provides microburst absorption with true, port-to-port, cut-through latency. Spectrum-4 also supports programmability of the pipeline and packet modifier/parser without impact tolatency or packet rate, enabling flexibility without compromising performance.
NVIDIA also notes that its Spectrum-4 switch enables accelerated RoCE-based data transport and load balancing through adaptive routing (including adaptive routing notifications for dynamic flow rebalance), as well as high precision congestion control (HPCC) facilitated through in-band network telemetry.
The chip is based on a 4nm process and is expected to sample later this year.
“A new era of massive-scale cloud technologies, such as Omniverse, requires a transformation of data center architecture,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of Networking at NVIDIA. “The Spectrum-4 platform’s extreme performance and robust security will equip data centers to power breakthrough discoveries that push the boundaries of what’s possible for the benefit of society.”
