What is a switch?

Switch is a data communication device used for data transmission and exchange between the Internet and devices. Each network port of the switch can be connected to a host or network node to achieve data interconnection between all devices. Switch is the information terminal of major enterprises. For data centers, the speed of the switch determines the efficiency of information communication with the Internet. In the era of big data and artificial intelligence, the structured and unstructured data of the Internet are growing rapidly. According to IDC's prediction, the Internet data will reach more than 216ZB in 2026. For Meta, Microsoft, Google and other Internet companies, the switch is the most critical information terminal of major Internet companies.

800G switches will become an inevitable requirement

In the past few years, the speed of the entire data center link has increased from 25G/100G to 100G/400G. In the medium and long term perspective, major cloud servers and Internet companies around the world are expected to increase their investment in data center infrastructure to meet the needs of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things. In the context of global digital transformation, increasing the speed of network data transmission has become an important issue. Therefore, updating and iterating on faster and more powerful 800G switches will become an inevitable requirement in the future market. According to Dell'OroGroup's prediction, 800G switch shipments will exceed 400G switch shipments by 2024, and the penetration rate will continue to increase.

800G switches drive high-frequency high-speed PCB demand. From 100G switches to 400G switches, and then to 800G switches, the performance requirements for PCB boards are increasing with the transmission rate of switches. This will increase the demand for high-layer high-frequency high-speed PCBs and increased value of PCB. According to ITEQ published PCB board grading system, IT-988G products for 100G/400G switches are ultra low loss level, with a single channel transmission rate of only 56Gbps, which cannot meet the requirements of 800G switches with a single channel transmission rate of 112Gbps. We believe that data transmission rates will continue to increase.

With the support of optical communication, the network capacity of NVIDIA DGX GH200 application switch increases dramatically

Nvidia's DGX GH200, a new supercomputer released on May 29, 2023, uses NVLink C2C chip interconnection technology with a two-layer network architecture. In the first layer network, 3 NVLink switches are used to fully connect the 8 GPUs carried on it to form a first-level module. Then in the second layer network architecture, 32 NVLink switches are used to fully connect 32 first-level modules, achieving a technological breakthrough of sharing the memory of 256 GPU blocks to form a whole giant GPU. It provides a total bandwidth up to 900 GB/s, which is 7 times higher than the PCIe 5.0 channel usually used. This greatly enhances the optical communication ability. The design concept and performance of Nvidia's DGX GH200 supercomputer will have an impact on the design of AI servers. In the future, AI servers may adopt similar technologies using NVLink C2C technology and switch as the foundation of the network architecture for chip interconnection to improve server computing power.

Article reference source：AI带来PCB增量，强α者率先受益-国金证券[樊志远,邓小路,刘妍雪]

智电驱动，驶向光明未来-财通证券[彭勇,赵成,管正月]

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