Socket Direct OCP NIC 3.0?

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Y0s

Member
Feb 25, 2021
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Hi,

Mellanox have had "socket direct" adaptors since ConnectX-5 which avoid cross-socket bottlenecks by plugging into 2 PCIe slots:
Unfortunately they don't seem to be widely available/adopted?

There was a talk at the last OCP Virtual Summit about the same fuctionality from a single OCP 3.0 NIC:

It appears to require platform-specific features in order to connect to multiple PCIe buses? I'd be interested if this could be confirmed/tested in future reviews? This feature could be important for some use cases, for example some high-performance storage generally recommends a NIC per socket due to this issue.

I'd be really interested in a review of the Mellanox MCX653436A-HDAI ConnectX-6 VPI 200Gb/s OCP 3.0 card (current list price $1,795). That would be a fantastic amount of flexible bandwidth in a compact form factor (if it performs at specs?)

Generally I look forward to future OCP 3.0 NIC articles and reviews!

Thank you for your consideration, and for this site & community.
 
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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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We are going to do Mellanox CX6 200GbE cards, but single port, not the socket direct. Multi-host adapters are still a bit exotic, but eventually, we need to do a piece on the Silicom 100GbE Fulcrum adapters.