This month, Ultra Ethernet Consortium Steering Member Broadcom has introduced the Thor Ultra, an 800G AI Ethernet NIC fully compliant with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium specification. Built for the next generation of large-scale AI clusters, Thor Ultra is capable of connecting hundreds of thousands of XPUs while maintaining the openness and interoperability that define UEC.
Thor Ultra introduces advanced RDMA features designed for AI-scale networking, including packet-level multipathing, out-of-order delivery directly to XPU memory, selective retransmit, and programmable congestion control. It supports PCIe Gen6 x16, 100G or 200G PAM4 SerDes, line-rate encryption and decryption with PSP offload, and secure boot with device attestation. The NIC is available in both PCIe CEM and OCP 3.0 form factors.
This launch marks an important step for the UEC ecosystem, showing how open Ethernet standards can drive performance and scalability for AI workloads while giving organizations flexibility across XPUs, optics, and switches.
Read more:
- Press Release: Broadcom Introduces Industry’s First 800G AI Ethernet NIC
- ServeTheHome: Broadcom Thor Ultra 800GbE NICs Launched
- SDxCentral: Broadcom unveils 800G Thor Ultra NIC to bust AI cluster scaling bottlenecks
As AI infrastructures grow in scale and complexity, innovations like Thor Ultra highlight the value of open, standards-based networking that UEC is built to enable.
Interested in shaping the future of open Ethernet for AI and HPC? Join the Ultra Ethernet Consortium and get involved in building the standards that will define tomorrow’s data infrastructure.
