Broadcom Introduces Industry’s First 800G AI Ethernet NIC

Thor Ultra is fully compliant with Ultra Ethernet Consortium; delivers cutting-edge performance, scalability, and reliability for Artificial Intelligence (AI) scale-out networking.

Palo Alto, Calif. – Broadcom Inc. announced Thor Ultra, the first 800G AI Ethernet Network Interface Card (Network Interface Controller (NIC)), designed to connect a large number of XPUs for large-scale AI workloads. The introduction of this Network Interface Controller (NIC) allows businesses to enhance performance and efficiency while utilizing an open ecosystem that follows the new Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) standards.

“Thor Ultra delivers on the vision of Ultra Ethernet Consortium for modernizing RDMA for large AI clusters,” said Random Access Memory (RAM) Velaga, senior vice president and general manager of the Core Switching Group at Broadcom. Thor Ultra supports innovative Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities such as packet-level multipathing and out-of-order packet delivery that are compliant with UEC specifications.

Key features of Thor Ultra include support for both 200G and 100G PAM4 Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes), available in PCI Express (PCIe) Computational Electromagnetics (CEM) and OCP 3.0 form factors, and a PCIe Gen6 x16 host interface. The NIC also offers line-rate encryption with Pipeline Security Policy (PSP) offload, ensuring high performance while relieving host resources from intensive tasks. Furthermore, it facilitates connectivity to diverse XPU types and reduces reliance on proprietary solutions.

Availability updates indicate that Broadcom has begun sampling Thor Ultra. The NIC complements the company’s existing Ethernet AI networking portfolio, including the Tomahawk switch series, enhancing options for high-performance deployments in AI environments across various industries.