HighPoint on Thursday introduced its Rocket 7638D PCIe 5.0 switch card that is designed to enable Nvidia's GPUDirect interconnection between AI GPUs and NVMe storage devices. The device is designed to speed up AI training and inference workloads when operating with software that fully support GPUDirect.
The latest GPUs from Nvidia (starting from A100) support GPUDirect technologies that enable direct data transfers between GPUs and other devices, such as SSD or network interfaces, bypassing the CPU and system memory to increase performance and free CPU resources for other workloads. However, GPUDirect requires support both from the GPU and from a PCIe switch that supports P2P DMA capability, but not all PCIe Gen5 switches support this feature, which is where switch cards come into play.
