Semiconductor manufacturer Alphawave Semi has joined the newly formed Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink). UALink is an open industry standardized fabric interconnect for accelerator-to-accelerator communication. It is designed to deliver a low-latency and high-bandwidth interface to meet the needs of scale-up artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, facilitating the coherency of operations between large nodes of AI accelerators.
Demands from AI will require accelerated compute infrastructure to scale-up networks and data center infrastructure to run the AI applications and meet specialized compute demands. Currently, general-purpose systems aren’t meeting these needs.
The interface pools up to 1,024 XPUs into a single node with a latency of less than 100 nanoseconds pin-to-pin and supports data transfer at up to 224 Gbps per lane. By optimizing 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.
Letizia Giuliano, Alphawave Semi’s vice president of IP product marketing said, "Alphawave Semi is at the forefront of connectivity for AI and HPC [high-performance computing], and by working with the UALink Consortium we will deliver our industry leading performance in connectivity solutions for timely, practical solutions to our customers to form the backbone of AI infrastructure."
The UALink 1.0 specification will be available in Q1 2025.
