In two new product announcements, Broadcom says it has made important advances in network connectivity equipment. Today, Broadcom introduced the Thor Ultra, an 800G AI Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC) that the company says can connect hundreds of thousands of XPUs to accommodate trillion-parameter AI workloads.
Last week, the company announced the Tomahawk 6-Davisson, a 102.4 Tbps Ethernet Switch with co-packaged optics.
The Thor Ultra, which now is available for sampling, complies with Ultra Ethernet Consortium specifications.
The Broadcom Thor Ultra NIC offers:
- Packet-Level multipathing for efficient load balancing.
- Out-of-Order packet delivery directly to XPU memory for maximizing fabric
- utilization.
- Selective retransmission for efficient data transfer.
- Programmable receiver-based and sender-based congestion control algorithms.
The press release offers a long list of specifications and product highlights. The Broadcom Thor Ultra NIC is available in standard PCIe CEM and OCP 3.0 form factors; 200G or 100G PAM4 SerDes with support for long-reach passive copper; low bit error rate SerDes (which reduces link flaps and accelerates job completion time); PCI Express Gen6 x16 host interface; line-rate encryption and decryption with PSP offload; secure boot with signed firmware and device attestation; programmable congestion control pipeline and packet trimming and Congestion Signaling (CSIG) support with Tomahawk 5, Tomahawk 6 or any UEC compliant switch.
“Thor Ultra delivers on the vision of Ultra Ethernet Consortium for modernizing RDMA for large AI clusters,” Ram Velaga, the senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s Core Switching Group, said in a press release about the new Broadcom NIC.
The Tomahawk 6-Davisson was designed for the exigencies of AI. The company claims that it is the fastest Ethernet switch with optically enabled switching capability.
Speed is king in the era of AI. At the SCTE TechExpo25 in Washington, D.C. late last month, Broadcom and Charter — via its Spectrum brand — demonstrated a single Wi-Fi device reaching a throughput of nearly 10 Gbps. It did so by combining a 6 GHz band with 125 MHz of spectrum in the 7.125–7.25 GHz band.
