Nvidia's proprietary NVLink and NVSwitch let it charge a premium for scale-up networking, but Upscale AI is developing an alternative. This week the startup revealed more about SkyHammer, its scale-up switch ASIC, which it says has 115.2 Tb/sec aggregate bandwidth, putting it on par with the best scale-out network ASICs from Cisco, Broadcom, and Nvidia.
SkyHammer is the foundation of the SkyFabriX architecture, which can support up to 576 accelerators in a single networking tier, similar to Nvidia's NVSwitch approach. The company plans to gang multiple SkyHammer ASICs to build switches with multi-petabit aggregate bandwidth, a common technique used by Broadcom and Cisco.
Upscale AI is simultaneously partnering with Nvidia and competing with it. Nvidia's NVLink Fusion lets custom CPUs and XPUs connect into Nvidia's rackscale systems, but Upscale AI is building its own scale-up network. The company has raised $500 million to date, with its valuation doubling to $2 billion and headcount exceeding 300 since January.