NVIDIA ConnectX-7 Shown at ISC 2022

At ISC 2022 perhaps the biggest news from NVIDIA is that they have a customer for next year’s Grace and Grace Hopper processors. Still, since there is at least SC22 between now and when those chips are slated to be sold, our sense is that we will hear more about the system later this year. Beyond that though, we actually saw something different on the show floor. Specifically, we saw the NVIDIA ConnectX-7 (formerly Mellanox) at several booths through NVIDIA’s seeding efforts.

NVIDIA ConnectX-7 Shown at ISC 2022

NVIDIA has a number of announced ConnectX-7 SKUs, including PCIe, OCP NIC 3.0, and IC form factors. On the show floor, we saw a single port PCIe version.

Here is the port view in a full-height bracket using a Supermicro SuperBlade as perhaps the most expensive display stand we could find:

We also had this on the blade server switch modules.

Here is the top of the unit. One item to note here is just how big the heatsink is on the optical cage to handle the dissipation from 200Gbpe/ 400Gbps class optics.

Looking at the rear of the unit, we can see a very interestingly shaped backplate. This is the NDR200 MCX75210AAS-HEAT model from the table above.

These CX75210AA modules were built on 5/15/2022 meaning they were at ISC 2022 about two weeks after they were made. Infiniband cards in general have been in tight supply in the industry over the past few quarters.

If you saw our NVIDIA Cedar Fever 1.6Tbps Modules Used in the DGX H100 these take four of the ConnectX-7 controllers and place them on a single assembly. There are then two of these assemblies in the DGX H100 system.

Still, it was the first show where we have seen the ConnectX-7 cards live and there were a few at the show.

Bonus: NVIDIA H100 Pictures

While we have already had time to check out the NVIDIA H100 in Our First Look at Hopper, the A100’s we have seen have all been mounted in Delta or Redstone assemblies. This is an example:

On the show floor, it seems as though NVIDIA sprinkled A100 SXM modules with their heatsinks throughout. Here is the side view of one:

Here is the underside view of the A100:

For some reference, this bottom view is a big difference between the A100 (above) and new H100 (below) in terms of connections.

There is also a different density of components on the H100’s board versus the A100. We also did not see H100’s on the show floor at ISC 2022.

Final Words

This was one of the fun items we saw on the ISC 2022 show floor. Most of the new hardware will be out in force at SC22 later this year, so we are just on the cusp of the PCIe Gen5 generation with new chips and devices. Still getting to see the new cards is always fun. We are going to expect to see them in the market in higher volumes later this year as the partner companies at ISC all seemed to think volume shipments were still a few months away on the ConnectX-7 side.