AMD deploys its first Ultra Ethernet ready network card — Pensando Pollara provides up to 400 Gbps performance

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be among the first hyperscalers to deploy AMD's latest Instinct MI350X-series GPUs as well as its Pensando Pollara 400GbE network interface card, which is the industry's first Ultra Ethernet-compliant NIC, AMD disclosed at its Advancing AI event. The announcement comes as the Ultra Ethernet Consortium this week published Specification 1.0 of the Ultra Ethernet technology designed for hyper-scale AI and HPC data centers. 

Systems featuring AMD's Instinct MI350X-series GPUs as well as Pensando Pollara 400GbE NICs will be broadly available at OCI and possibly other cloud service providers in the second half of this year, according to the company. The Pensando Pollara 400GbE network cards will be particularly handy for Oracle, which plans to broadly deploy AMD's latest AI GPUs and build a zettascale AI cluster with up to 131,072 Instinct MI355X to enable its customers to train and inference AI models at a massive scale. 

AMD's Pensando Pollara 400GbE NICs — just like other Ultra Ethernet-compliant network hardware — are designed for massive scale-out environments containing up to a million AI processors or GPUs and promise an up to six times performance boost for AI workloads. AMD claims that its Pollara 400GbE card offers a 10% higher RDMA performance compared to Nvidia's CX7 and 20% higher RDMA performance than Broadcom's Thor2 solution. In addition, UEC 1.0 features like efficient load-balancing, selective retransmission, and path-aware congestion control can further improve RDMA performance by 25% compared to traditional RoCEv2. 

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The Pensando Pollara 400GbE NIC is based on an in-house designed specialized processor with customizable hardware that supports RDMA, adjustable transport protocols, and offloading of communication libraries. The NIC can intelligently split data streams across multiple routes to avoid bottlenecks and dynamically reroute traffic away from overloaded network paths to ensure consistent throughput across large-scale GPU deployments. 

In addition, AMD's Pollara 400GbE card features failover technology that rapidly detects and bypasses the connection to preserve high-speed GPU-to-GPU links. Such capabilities are crucial for maintaining cluster utilization and reducing latencies in environments with tens of thousands of interconnected accelerators.

While Oracle will be the first big hyperscaler to deploy AMD's Pollara 400GbE NICs (as it will probably own the largest AMD Instinct MI355X-based cluster), other companies that plan large-scale AMD Instinct deployments will follow soon, popularizing adoption of Ultra Ethernet gear. The cards are currently shipping to interested parties.

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