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Product Overview

This is the User Guide for  Ethernet adapter cards based on the ConnectX®-5 and ConnectX®-5 Ex integrated circuit device. These adapters connectivity provide the highest performing low latency and most flexible interconnect solution for PCI Express Gen 3.0/4.0 servers used in Enterprise Data Centers and High-Performance Computing environments.

The following provides the ordering part number, port speed, number of ports, and PCI Express speed. Each adapter comes with two bracket heights - short and tall.

ConnectX-5 Ex Ethernet Adapter Cards

ModelConnectX-5 Ex Ethernet Adapter Cards
Part NumberMCX512A-ADATMCX516A-BDATMCX516A-CDAT
Ethernet Data Rate1/10/25 Gb/s

1/10/25/40 Gb/s

10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s
Network Connector Type

Dual-port SFP28

Dual-port QSFP28

Dual-port QSFP28

PCI Express Connectors

PCIe Gen 3.0/4.0 x16 (a), (b)
SERDES @ 8.0GT/s / 16.0GT/s

Dimensions2.71 in. x 5.6 in. (68.90mm x 142.24 mm) – low profile
RoHSRoHS Compliant
IC Part NumberMT28808A0-FCCF-EV

a. PCIe 4.0 x16 bus can supply a maximum bandwidth of 256Gb/s (=16 *16GT/s, including overhead), and can support 200Gb/s when both network ports of the card run at 100Gb/s. 
b. The MCX516A-CDAT card has been tested and certified with PCIe 3.0 servers. PCIe 4.0 interface will be tested when servers with Gen 4.0 support become available.


ConnectX-5 Ethernet 25Gb/s Adapter Cards

Model

ConnectX-5 Ethernet Adapter Cards

Part NumberMCX512A-ACATMCX512A-ACUT  MCX512F-ACATMCX512F-ACHT
Ethernet Data Rate

1/10/25 Gb/s

Network Connector Type

Dual-port SFP28

PCI Express Connectors

PCIe Gen 3.0 x8
SerDes @ 8.0GT/s

PCIe Gen 3.0 x16
SerDes @ 8.0GT/s

Dimensions2.71 in. x 5.6 in. (68.90mm x 142.24 mm) – low profile
Host Management---
UEFI Enabled (x86/Arm)--
RoHSRoHS Compliant
IC Part NumberMT27808A0-FCCF-EV

ConnectX-5 Ethernet 50Gb/s Adapter Cards

Model

ConnectX-5 Ethernet Adapter Cards

Part NumberMCX515A-GCATMCX516A-GCAT
Ethernet Data Rate10/25/40/50 Gb/s
Network Connector Type

Single-port QSFP28

Dual-port QSFP28

PCI Express Connectors

PCIe Gen 3.0 x16
SerDes @ 8.0GT/s

Dimensions2.71 in. x 5.6 in. (68.90mm x 142.24 mm) – low profile
Host Management--
UEFI Enabled (x86/Arm)--
RoHSRoHS Compliant
IC Part NumberMT27808A0-FCCF-EV


ConnectX-5 Ethernet 100Gb/s Adapter Cards

Model

ConnectX-5 Ethernet Adapter Cards

Part NumberMCX515A-CCAT

MCX515A-CCUT

MCX516A-CCATMCX516A-CCHT
Ethernet Data Rate10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s
Network Connector Type

Single-port QSFP28

Single-port QSFP28

Dual-port QSFP28

Dual-port QSFP28
PCI Express Connectors

PCIe Gen 3.0 x16
SerDes @ 8.0GT/s

Dimensions2.71 in. x 5.6 in. (68.90mm x 142.24 mm) – low profile
Host Management
--
UEFI Enabled (x86/Arm)--
RoHSRoHS Compliant
IC Part NumberMT27808A0-FCCF-EV

For more detailed information see Specifications.

Features and Benefits

This section describes hardware features and capabilities. Please refer to the relevant driver and/or firmware release notes for feature availability.

FeatureDescription
PCI Express (PCIe)Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) and Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) through an x8 or x16 edge connector. Gen 1.1 and 2.0 compatible.
Up to 25 Gigabit Ethernet

NVIDIA adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:

100GbE/ 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE
IEEE 802.3bj, 802.3bm 100 Gigabit Ethernet
IEEE 802.3by, Ethernet Consortium25, 50 Gigabit Ethernet, supporting all FEC modes
IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
IEEE 802.3by 25 Gigabit Ethernet
IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation and KR startup
Proprietary Ethernet protocols (20/40GBASE-R2, 50GBASE-R4)
IEEE 802.3ad, 802.1AX Link Aggregation
IEEE 802.1Q, 802.1P VLAN tags and priority
IEEE 802.1Qau (QCN)
Congestion Notification
IEEE 802.1Qaz (ETS)
IEEE 802.1Qbb (PFC)
IEEE 802.1Qbg
IEEE 1588v2
Jumbo frame support (9.6KB)

Memory
  • SPI Quad - includes 128Mbit SPI Quad Flash device (W25Q128FVSIG device by ST Microelectronics).
  • Available in QSFP28 OPNs: FRU EEPROM - Stores the parameters and personality of the card. The EEPROM capacity is 128Kbit. FRU I2C address is (0x50) and is accessible through the PCIe SMBus. (Note: Address 0x58 is reserved.)

Overlay NetworksIn order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines, placing higher loads on the host CPU. ConnectX-5 effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol.
RDMA and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)ConnectX-5, utilizing IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technology, delivers low-latency and high-performance over Band and Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-5 advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
NVIDIA PeerDirect™PeerDirect™ communication provides high-efficiency RDMA access by eliminating unnecessary internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus (for example, from GPU to CPU), and therefore significantly reduces application run time. ConnectX-5 advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.
CPU OffloadAdapter functionality enabling reduced CPU overhead allowing more available CPU for computation tasks.
Open vSwitch (OVS) offload using ASAP2(TM)
• Flexible match-action flow tables
• Tunneling encapsulation/decapsulation
Quality of Service (QoS)Support for port-based Quality of Service enabling various application requirements for latency and SLA.
Hardware-based I/O VirtualizationConnectX-5 provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines within the server.
Storage AccelerationA consolidated compute and storage network achieves significant cost-performance advantages over multi-fabric networks. Standard block and file access protocols can leverage RDMA for high-performance storage access.
• NVMe over Fabric offloads for the target machine
• Erasure Coding
• T10-DIF Signature Handover
SR-IOVConnectX-5 SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server.
NC-SIThe adapter supports a Network Controller Sideband Interface (NC-SI), MCTP over SMBus and MCTP over PCIe - Baseboard Management Controller interface.
High-Performance Accelerations• Tag Matching and Rendezvous Offloads
• Adaptive Routing on Reliable Transport
• Burst Buffer Offloads for Background Checkpointing
UEFI Enabled

Enabled in MCX516A-CCHT and MCX512F-ACHT.
UEFI Enabled (x86/Arm) is enabled in MCX515A-CCUT and MCX512A-ACUT.  

Operating Systems/Distributions

  • RHEL/CentOS
  • Windows
  • FreeBSD
  • VMware
  • OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
  • OpenFabrics Windows Distribution (WinOF-2)

Connectivity

  • Interoperable with 1/10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s Ethernet switches
  • Passive copper cable with ESD protection
  • Powered connectors for optical and active cable support