Astera speaks softly and carries a big switch

Astera Labs unveiled an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for building rack-scale AI systems on Tuesday, claiming it will work with nearly any accelerator. The AI fabric switch, codenamed Scorpio X, crams 320 lanes of PCIe 6.0 connectivity into a single ASIC with 5.12 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth. Historically, PCIe switches have been used in a variety of applications including scale-out compute fabrics.