NVIDIA Networking Overview

NVIDIA LinkX Cables and Transceivers Guide to Key Technologies

The NVIDIA LinkX line of cables and transceivers offers a wide array of products for configuring any network switching and adapter system. The NVIDIA LinkX cable and transceiver product line focuses exclusively on data center lengths of up to 2 kilometers for accelerated artificial intelligence computing systems. To minimize data retransmissions, the cables and transceivers are designed and tested to extremely low bit error ratios (BER) required for low-latency, high-bandwidth artificial intelligence and accelerated computing applications.

These are designed to work seamlessly with NVIDIA’s entire networking product line:

  • NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand network switches

  • NVIDIA Spectrum™ Ethernet network switches

  • NVIDIA ConnectX® PCIe network adapters

  • NVIDIA BlueField® PCIe DPUs

NVIDIA designs and builds complete subsystems based on the above switches, adapters, and interconnects. All these subsystems, including the switch, network adapter, DPU, CPU, GPU and transceiver integrated circuits, are designed, manufactured, and/or sourced, all from one supplier NVIDIA, and tested to work optimally in NVIDIA end-to-end complete configurations – specifically for artificial intelligence and accelerated applications.

NVIDIA’s networking offering consists of the Quantum InfiniBand platform and the Spectrum Ethernet platform. Each of these consists of NVIDIA Quantum or Spectrum network switches, ConnectX PCIe-based network adapters, and BlueField PCIe-based Data Processing Units or DPUs. These are all interconnected using the LinkX cable and transceiver product line which consists of:

  • Direct attached copper (DAC) cables

  • Linear active copper cables (ACC)

  • Multimode transceivers and fibers

  • Active optical cables (AOCs)

  • Single-mode transceivers and fibers.


Cable and Transceiver Product Line for 100G-PAM4 and 50G-PAM4 for InfiniBand and Spectrum Ethernet

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© Copyright 2023, NVIDIA. Last updated on Aug 29, 2023.