Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink) on Tuesday said that Alibaba Cloud, Apple, and Synopsys have been elected to its board of directors, which allows the companies to influence development of UALink, a technology designed to enable connectivity of AI and HPC accelerators and meant to compete against Nvidia's NVLink. The announcement outlines Apple's interest in datacenter connectivity for AI and may indicate that the company is working on a datacenter product for AI acceleration.
The UALink specification version 1.0 due in the first quarter of 2025 will enable connection of up to 1,024 accelerators within an AI computing pod in a low-latency network at a speed of 200 Gb/s. This specification allows for direct data transfers between the memory attached to processors, which is particularly important for AI training workloads. The new standard is an open industry standard that is backed by AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft, which are all known developers of AI hardware and software. There are 65 companies behind UALink.
