Astera Labs 发布 Scorpio X PCIe 6.0 交换芯片，面向机架级 AI 系统

AI + ML

High-speed connectivity without NVLink baggage

Astera Labs unveiled an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for building rack-scale AI systems on Tuesday, claiming it will work with nearly any accelerator.

The AI fabric switch, codenamed Scorpio X, crams 320 lanes of PCIe 6.0 connectivity into a single ASIC with 5.12 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth.

Historically, PCIe switches have been used in a variety of applications including scale-out compute fabrics. CPUs alone either didn't offer enough or fast enough lanes for all the GPUs, NICs, and storage required. So, rather than hanging everything off the CPU, a PCIe switch, often built into the NIC, was used to connect everything together.

Astera contends that with a big enough switch, PCIe is a viable alternative to interconnects like NVLink, in the scale-up fabrics used to make dozens or more GPUs behave more like a single large one without needing to redesign their accelerators.

However, Astera hasn't just built a bigger PCIe switch. Scorpio is equipped with many of the same in-network compute capabilities as Nvidia's NVSwitch, which help to accelerate collective communications.

These communications are especially important for generative AI inference. Large language models have become rather chatty from a network standpoint as mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures have caught on.

MoE models are composed of multiple sub-models called experts. For each token generated, a different selection of experts, potentially running on different GPUs, may be used.

By moving collective communications to the switch, the GPUs spend less time waiting for the network to catch up and more time churning out tokens.

Astera has gone so far as to develop a multicast operation optimized for MoE inference that it calls Hypercast.

"One of the limitations of the standard multicast is the number of groups you can actually support, as well as the dynamic nature of needing to change those groups on the fly for mixture-of-experts models," Ahmad Danesh, AVP of product management at Astera, told El Reg.

Where Scorpio fits in the scale-up ecosystem

While there are clear benefits to using PCIe as a chip-to-chip interconnect, Scorpio isn't exactly a replacement for Nvidia's NVSwitch chips. NVSwitch 6, announced at CES in January, offers nearly 3x the bandwidth at 14.4 TB/s.

However, Astera doesn't need to compete with NVSwitch directly. In fact, Astera announced plans to extend support for NVLink Fusion, Nvidia's attempt to open its high-speed interconnect to the broader ecosystem, last spring.

Instead, Scorpio is being positioned more as a vendor agnostic alternative. Technologies like NVLink Fusion or the emerging UALink protocol are gaining traction, but chips need to be designed around them.

PCIe works with just about anything because it's already used to get data in and out of the accelerators. For example, if you wanted to stitch together 32 or more Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Server cards, you'd need a PCIe switch, since those GPUs don't support NVLink at all.

PCIe also makes it easier to mix and match chips for disaggregated inference architectures, like we've seen with Nvidia and Groq, AWS and Cerebras, or Intel and SambaNova.

These architectures involve using one accelerator for compute heavy prefill operations and another for bandwidth intensive decode operations. For this to work, the chips have to be connected to one another. Many AI chip builders are doing this over Ethernet, but PCIe would be more direct.

MORE CONTEXT

Inside Amazon Web Services' plan to make networking disappear; Bandwidth hogs rejoice, Celestica's latest switch is bristling with 64 ports of 1.6 Tbps Ethernet; Google to sell its TPUs to some customers, who also fancy big-G GPUs; Meta Arms itself to the teeth by signing for 'tens of millions' of AWS Graviton cores

Alongside its Scorpio X family of chips, Astera is also expanding its Scorpio P-series switches with models ranging from 32 to 320 lanes of PCIe connectivity.

All of these switches work with its COSMOS management suite, a hardware monitoring platform designed to help track down and resolve issues across the network fabric.

Astera's refreshed Scorpio switches are currently sampling with production expected to ramp in the second half of 2026. ®

Fire up that iPhone 1 emulation and party like it's 2007

Browser-based fun to remember a time before Apple's annual cash grab became a thing

New motherboards, old RAM, plenty of life left in yesterday's PCs

DDR4 makes a comeback as component costs rise, while Linux offers an escape from forced upgrades

The VMware exit is a protection upgrade

PARTNER CONTENT: VergeIO says an exit is also an opportunity

Tiny11 puts Windows 11 on a diet without the PowerShell workout

New desktop app simplifies stripping out bundled software, with heavier cuts carrying security and support risks

It won't kill you, or humanity, to get off the AI upgrade treadmill

New models arrive so fast, we already have more new tech than it's possible to understand in a career

Cisco, Nvidia team up to build fatter, faster pluggable

If you thought 1.6 Tbps was fast, just wait, Cisco's USFP targets 12.8 Tbps in a single optical pluggable

TOP STORIES

Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude; '123456' password linked to Denmark data breach affecting 8.8M people; Microsoft and Anthropic play invoice tennis with startup's $17,600 Claude bill; Starlink's plan to avoid orbital near-misses: Ephemeris sharing; Shai-Hulud worm makes jump to AI infrastructure with Tensorlake compromise; Dutch tax office ditches Microsoft 365 cloud for on-premises alternative

Cisco, Nvidia team up to build fatter, faster pluggable If you thought 1.6 Tbps was fast, just wait, Cisco's USFP targets 12.8 Tbps in a single optical pluggable; Claude submitted fake murder tip to Philly police during summertime testing Anthropic took more than two months to alert cops; AI systems are fully capable of carrying out nightmare attacks against infrastructure and nobody's ready Meanwhile, AI agents move robotic arms, 'make OT device operator screens lie'; Nvidia found $1B under the couch to help secure American scientific computing dominance Commitment comes as GPUzilla prepares to fortify Uncle Sam's arsenal with at least seven AI-optimized supers; TSMC taps GlobalFoundries to bolster US silicon interposer production in $2B deal Advanced packaging tech is essential to the domestic production of high-performance semiconductors used in AI datacenters

Infosec

Security Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more!; Security Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more; Black Hat and DEF CON DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure Voting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included; Security EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz Acronis Went at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified; Malware Month Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight On the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career

FOSS

NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS Increasing awareness and adoption, followed by increasing donations; OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficulties Persistent agents appeal to AI companies, but demand isn't obvious; Ubuntu 'Stonking Stingray' beta swims out: Deeper Rust 'oxidization' plus LLM speech-to-text GNOME 51 is here, and Ubuntu interim releases are getting interesting again; Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of care All this, and angry NeoVim users; Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?* Yet another new version of Firefox, with a significant reskin; KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal Akademy talk imagines Plasma assembling itself around a personal model of each user