Alphawave Semi joins UALink consortium to accelerate high-speed AI connections
Alphawave Semi has joined the newly formed Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink).
With the emergence of accelerated compute infrastructure to enable AI workloads spanning compute, training and inference, new purpose-built scale-up networks are required to scale data centre infrastructure to meet the specialised compute demands that general-purpose systems are falling short to meet.
UALink is an open industry standardised fabric interconnect for accelerator-to-accelerator communication designed to deliver low-latency and high-bandwidth interface to meet the needs of scale-up AI infrastructure, facilitating the coherency of operations between large nodes of AI accelerators.
The interface pools up to 1,024 XPUs into a single node with a latency of less than 100 ns pin-to-pin and supports data transfer at up to 224 Gbps per lane. By optimising the data and transaction layers, UALink significantly reduces die area, power and overhead compared to other solutions.
The Consortium membership unites expertise from hyperscalers, system OEMs, accelerator and switch developers; Alphawave Semi plans on bringing its leadership in connectivity subsystems and chiplets to the consortium. The UALink Consortium was incorporated in October 2024 by a coalition of leading AI technology companies, including AMD, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft.
The UALink 1.0 specification will be available in Q1 2025.
