Firstly, the OCI MSA is hyperscaler-driven rather than vendor-driven. The arrangement is unlike most industry consortia, which are organized and led by independent hardware vendors (IHVs), IP companies, and networking suppliers.
Secondly, OCI targets a very specific architectural layer of AI systems — short-reach links that connect accelerators and switches within a scale-up domain. By contrast, traditional hardware development groups tend to standardize on a vertically integrated set of technologies to be widely adopted across a market or markets.
Thirdly, as the organization is a Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) group, it will, by definition, be faster than a typical industry standard setting body. MSAs are meant to enable select companies to align on electrical/optical interfaces and build interoperable products quickly, without the lengthy consensus processes typical of classic organizations like JEDEC or the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (which are designed to unite tens or hundreds of companies and support an entire industry). The OCI MSA — at least for now — will enable AMD, Broadcom, and Nvidia to build interoperable short-reach interconnections for Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI.
"Nvidia is a founding member of the OCI MSA to establish a common optical standard across global AI infrastructures," said Gilad Shainer, Senior Vice President of Networking at Nvidia. "By equipping best-in-class compute with state-of-the-art optics, the OCI MSA can deliver the scale and performance required by the next era of super-intelligence."
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom\u2019s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-18/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
alan.campbell99 Personally looking to the day when this sort of tech advancement is reported on more as HPC development rather than AI, I'd say that's wishful thinking though. Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amd-broadcom-and-nvidia-join-hyperscalers-to-define-optical-scale-up-interconnect-of-the-future-for-ai-clusters-meta-microsoft-and-openai-to-benefit-as-speeds-eventually-scale-to-3-2-tb-s#main
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