Susana SchwartzWhat Nvidia and Marvell 'coopetition' delivers
It’s always interesting when direct competitors integrate at the architectural level, so it’s significant that Marvell is connecting to the NVIDIA AI factory and AI-RAN ecosystem through NVIDIA NVLink Fusion.
Marvell is a direct competitor in several semiconductor categories, so the fact they will also collaborate on silicon photonics technology is even more fascinating. It shows how severe the bottlenecks are, and how neither company can solve it alone. It also builds on Marvell’s recent “double deals” for silicon switching specialist XConn and optical interconnect startup Celestial AI. With this deal, Marvell can build its own custom chips (XPUs) and plug directly into NVIDIA’s NVLink ecosystem – a kind of “hybrid” AI ecosystem that will allow third-party custom chips to communicate natively to NVIDIA GPUs. This is just the latest in what seems endless news about custom chips (ASICs), which are increasingly important as general-purpose GPUs get more and more expensive and too power-hungry for massive scale.
This partnership also fits into “the chiplet revolution,” where smaller chiplets are stitched together for more flexible, modular designs that will move the industry away from monolithic (single-die) chips.
Susana Schwartz
Technology Editor
RCRTech
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