Mellanox was acquired by NVIDIA a few years ago at a cost of $6.9 billion, and now we're seeing NVIDIA unveil its new ConnectX-7 SKUs that have some impressive features.
NVIDIA's new ConnectX-7 SKUs come in PCIe, OCP NIC 3.0, and IC form factors. At the International Supercomputing Conference, Serve the Home spotted a single-port PCIe version of NVIDIA's new ConnectX-7 that uses a SuperMicro SuperBlade.
We're only just seeing PCIe 5.0 connectivity hitting consumer boards with the new Intel Z690 chipset and Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs, while AMD and its new X670 + X670E chipsets and upcoming Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series CPUs supporting PCIe 5.0 on upcoming motherboards. But in servers and data centers, PCIe 5.0 is used for its super-high-speed bandwidth.
- Maximum Total Bandwidth: 400GbE
- Supported Ethernet Speeds: 10/25/40/50/100/ 200/400GbE
- Number of Network Ports: 1/2/4
- Network Interface Technologies: NRZ (10/25G) / PAM4 (50/100G)
- Host Interface PCIe Gen5.0: x16/x32
- Cards Form Factors: PCIe FHHL/HHHL,OCP3.0 SFF
- Network Interfaces: SFP56, QSFP56, QSFP56-DD, QSFP112, SFP112
In the pictures of the NVIDIA ConnectX-7 card, there's a huge heat sink across the card that helps keep the heat down... as you'll need it: the card can push an insane 400GbE. Now, your motherboard probably has 1GbE, maybe 2.5GbE at the higher-end. Newer flagship motherboards have 5GbE and 10GbE networking, but it's expensive for the switch -- and much more if you push into 10GbE and beyond.
400GbE however, is a different beast... you're talking beyond 40GB/sec transfers over the network, which makes things hot. Hence, the large heat sink on the NVIDIA ConnectX-7.