Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) has started shipping its latest Tomahawk Ultra ethernet switch, engineered to meet the demanding needs of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads. The device delivers a throughput of 51.2 Tbps while maintaining an ultra-low latency of 250 nanoseconds, according to the company’s announcement.
The Tomahawk Ultra is capable of handling up to 77 billion packets per second at line rate, even with minimum 64-byte packet sizes. Broadcom highlighted that the switch slashes ethernet header overhead from 46 bytes down to just 10 bytes, all while remaining fully compliant with ethernet standards.
Among its advanced features are Link Layer Retry and Credit-Based Flow Control, designed to minimize packet loss. Additionally, the switch offers In-Network Collectives, allowing operations like AllReduce to be executed within the switch chip itself instead of relying on processing units.
The new switch maintains 100% pin compatibility with Broadcom’s previous Tomahawk 5 model. Alongside it, Broadcom introduced SUE-Lite—a lower-power version of its Scale-Up Ethernet standard tailored for AI accelerator hardware.
“Tomahawk Ultra is a testament to innovation, involving a multi-year effort by hundreds of engineers who reimagined every aspect of the ethernet switch,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s Core Switching Group.
Supporting sophisticated network topologies such as Dragonfly, Mesh, and Torus, the product also meets UEC standards. When combined with Scale-Up Ethernet, it enables communication latency under 400 nanoseconds between processing units, including switch transit time.
Broadcom positions the Tomahawk Ultra alongside its more powerful 102.4 Tbps Tomahawk 6, both forming part of a cohesive ethernet architecture designed to support scale-up AI and scale-out HPC environments.
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