Broadcom Inc. began shipping a new version of its data center switch chips that can boost the efficiency of AI accelerators, aiming to take a bigger role in the booming market for artificial intelligence computing. The company started delivering the Tomahawk 6 switch chips to customers over the weekend, and the product will be broadly available in July, said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s Core Switching Group. Switches, a central piece of networking equipment, allow computers to communicate with one another. A single new Tomahawk 6 can do the work of six of the previous versions, Broadcom said. The vast majority of AI computing — both for developing models and running them — relies on accelerators from Nvidia Corp. Such chips, known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, are pricey and remain in limited supply. The idea is to make those components more efficient when they’re networked together. As AI tasks become more complicated and the models get larger, data center providers and researchers are chaining together tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of GPUs into supercomputers that rely on networking gear to move data between the chips. Those GPUs typically run at a utilization rate of only 30% to 40% because “they are waiting for the network to be able to communicate the data back and forth,” Velaga said. With Tomahawk 6, Broadcom projects that customers will be able to finish jobs faster using the GPUs they already have.

Full report : Broadcom begins shipping its Tomahawk 6 data center switch chips, which it says can perform the work of six previous-gen chips, to improve GPU utilization rates.