Guotai Junan: NVIDIA makes a move in Ethernet, large-scale networking trend emerges

According to the Zhitong Finance and Economics APP, Guotai Junan Securities released a research report stating that the network card speed doubles every year, emphasizing the development trend of Ethernet. Based on the company's Spectrum-X roadmap, the Spectrum-X800 in 2024 will meet the needs of tens of thousands of cards (with 400G DPU), in 2025 it will meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of cards (such as the xAI project), and in 2026 it will be able to meet the connection needs of millions of GPUs. It is important to pay attention to NVIDIA, as well as investment opportunities in the optical module suppliers and switch industries under the trend of Ethernet solution networking across the industry.

The Ethernet roadmap is clear, and the trend of super-large-scale networking is evident. At the ComputerX 2024 conference, CEO Huang Renxun emphasized that the Spectrum-X series networking scale will see an order of magnitude increase every year. From 2024 to 2026, there will be a new generation of switch product lines and matching network cards released each year.

At the GTC conference in March 2024, the Spectrum-X800 51.2T Ethernet switch was already released, with a maximum of 256 ports, and the matching network card is the BlueField3 400G SuperNIC, capable of networking tens of thousands of GPUs (up to about 32K); in 2025, the Spectrum-X800 Ultra version will be released, mainly for clustering with the CX8-800G network card, capable of connecting a scale of tens of thousands of GPUs; in 2026, a 102.4T switch will be released, with the CX9 1.6T network card, capable of connecting a scale of millions of GPUs.

The roadmap for 2024-2027 is clear, with one generation iteration per year. The evolution highlights the GPU platform roadmap from 2022 to 2027. Guotai Junan Securities points out that NVIDIA's introduction of higher-speed Ethernet and IB switches is evenly focused, with a focus on supporting the growth of the Ethernet product line.

Specifically, in 2025, the Blackwell Ultra GPU will be launched, along with the Spectrum Ultra X800 Ethernet switch (Radix=512); in 2026, the Rubin platform will be launched, with the Rubin GPU (8 HBM4), Vera CPU, NVLink6 switch chip (3600GB/sec), CX9 network card (1600Gb), and X1600 IB/Ethernet Switch. In 2027, the Rubin Ultra GPU will be launched, with network support to be determined.

Overall, the company's product roadmap follows the concept of "one iteration per year," with major platform architecture iterations every two years and minor internal architecture iterations within a year. For example, the B series will launch an ultra version, and the R series will also launch an ultra version in 2027 Catalyst: Companies receive orders for delivery; AI sees explosive applications.

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