Apple joins the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium, but what is it?
Apple, Alibaba and Synopsis have joined the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium, which develops new high-speed AI server technology, called UALink.
Unlike proprietary solutions, UALink is an open industry standard for high-speed, low-latency communication between components in AI data centers. The organization seeks to create a standardized interconnect for up to 1,024 accelerators within an AI computing pod, enabling direct memory operations between GPUs.
The announcement explains the three companies joined the organization as board members so they could influence UALink’s future direction and technology roadmap.
Apple joins the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium
The Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium plans to release the final UALink 1.0 specification in the first quarter of 2025. The first version should bring data speeds of up to 200Gbps per lane for up to 1024 accelerators within an AI pod.
The interconnect protocol was natively designed for AI accelerators to address the performance and bandwidth communication demands of hyperscale data centers.
UALink was proposed by the UALink Promoter Group, established in May 2024 by AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft. The organization was incorporated in October 2024 and now has more than 65 members.
Apple developing new AI chips for servers
Apple uses custom servers powered by its M2 Ultra chip to run complex Apple Intelligence models and features. However, The Information recently reported that Apple will move away from Mac chips as the company has been developing a new AI server chip containing “many duplicates” of its Neural Engine coprocessor.
The publication claims that these chips will use Broadcom technology to connect together and compute data more quickly. “That technology has been one of the key drivers of AI development, making it possible to compute the massive amounts of data required to train and run large language models,” it reads.
It’s unclear if The Information repot refers to Broadcom’s existing proprietary technology or its involvement in developing the UALink standard.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/01/14/apple-ultra-accelerator-link-consortium-announcement/
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