Broadcom Tries To Kill InfiniBand And NVSwitch With One Ethernet Stone
The Next Platform, Thursday, July 10th, 2025
InfiniBand was always supposed to be a mainstream fabric to be used across PCs, servers, storage, and networks, but the effort collapsed and the remains of the InfiniBand effort found a second life at the turn of the millennium as a high performance, low latency interconnect for supercomputers running simulations and models.
For decades, thanks to the low latency enabled by Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, a method of allowing CPUs and then GPUs and finally other kinds of XPUs to directly access the main memory of each other without having to go through the entire network software stack, InfiniBand found a niche and was one of the reasons why Nvidia shelled out $6.9 billion to acquire Mellanox Technologies more than five years ago.
Nvidia no doubt saw the GenAI boom coming and knew it would need InfiniBand as the back-end network linking GPU server nodes to each other so they could collaborate on training an AI model.