By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Cornelis Networks on Tuesday released a suite of networking hardware and software aimed at linking together up to half a million artificial intelligence chips.
Cornelis, which was spun out of Intel in 2020 and is still backed by the chipmaker’s venture capital fund, is targeting a problem that has bedeviled AI datacenters for much of the past decade: AI computing chips are very fast, but when many of those chips are strung together to work on big computing problems, the network links between the chips are not fast enough to keep the chips supplied with data.
Nvidia took aim at that problem with its $6.9 billion purchase in 2020 of networking chip firm Mellanox, which made networking gear with a network protocol called InfiniBand, which was created in the 1990s specifically for supercomputers.
Networking chip giants such as Broadcom and Cisco Systems are working to solve the same set of technical issues with Ethernet technology, which has connected most of the internet since the 1980s and is an open technology standard.
The Cornelis “CN5000” networking chips use a new network technology created by Cornelis called OmniPath. The chips will ship to initial customers such as the U.S. Department of Energy in the third quarter of this year, Cornelis CEO Lisa Spelman told Reuters on May 30.
Although Cornelis has backing from Intel, its chips are designed to work with AI computing chips from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices or any other maker using open-source software, Spelman said. She said that the next version of Cornelis chips in 2026 will also be compatible with Ethernet networks, aiming to alleviate any customer concerns that buying Cornelis chips would leave a data center locked into its technology.
“There’s 45-year-old architecture and a 25-year-old architecture working to solve these problems,” Spelman said. “We like to offer a new way and a new path for customers that delivers you both the (computing chip) performance and excellent economic performance as well.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler)
