AMD’s Helios MI455X AI platform breaks cover, initial systems use UALink-over-Ethernet interconnects — AMD’s Vera Rubin rival surfaces, but the downsides of Eth

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AMD's Helios MI455X AI platform breaks cover, initial systems use UALink-over-Ethernet interconnects — AMD's Vera Rubin rival surfaces, but the downsides of Eth

AMD, Broadcom, and Nvidia join hyperscalers to define optical scale-up interconnect of the future for AI clusters

But there is a major downside with using Ethernet, even with the UALink protocol on top: Ethernet was originally designed as a general-purpose networking technology; it was never designed to scale up AI accelerators.

As a result, communications may involve higher latency, more protocol overhead, and less deterministic performance than a dedicated scale-up fabric. For large AI training jobs that need all 72 Instinct MI455X accelerators to work in concert, communication efficiency is as important as compute performance. If the UALink-over-Ethernet interconnect cannot keep GPUs fed with data efficiently, some of the theoretical performance of the hardware may be lost in real-world deployments, even though on paper, Helios with UALink-over-Ethernet is as good as Nvidia’s NVL72 VR200 in scale-up bandwidth.

This begs the question of whether UALink will ever be widely used with Helios and whether UALink will ever be widely deployed using copper. Hyperscalers and other companies deploying high-end AI hardware at scale rarely upgrade their hardware.

While the Instinct MI455X certainly promises to be among the best hardware accelerators this year, Helios will likely only be rivalled by Nvidia’s NVL72 VR200. It will be outdated next year when AMD launches its Instinct MI500-series products. These units will be used in the company’s next-generation rack-scale offering, which promises to pack more AI GPUs, potentially requiring optical interconnects with UALink on top. As a result, Helios systems with true UALink interconnections over copper will be on the market for less than a year before those next-generation rack-scale solutions will hit the market.

Of course, nothing is stopping AMD from offering Helios with Instinct MI500-series accelerators and UALink interconnects over copper; however, the company hasn't confirmed the existence of such systems.

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/13-4-24/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.

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