SAN FRANCISCO, May 31 — Intel, Google, Microsoft, Meta and other tech giants announced on Thursday they are establishing a new industry group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group, to guide the development of components that link together AI accelerator chips in data centres, said Xinhua.
The UALink Promoter Group also counts AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Broadcom and Cisco among its members. The group is proposing a new industry standard to connect the AI accelerator chips within a growing number of servers.
"The industry needs an open standard that can be moved forward very quickly, in an open (format) that allows multiple companies to add value to the overall ecosystem," AMD general manager of data centre solutions Forrest Norrod said on Wednesday.
"The industry needs a standard that allows innovation to proceed at a rapid clip unfettered by any single company."
The first UALink products will launch "in the next couple of years", Norrod said.
Absent from the list of the group's members is Nvidia, which is by far the largest producer of AI accelerators with an estimated 80 per cent to 95 per cent of the market.
In Nvidia's most recent fiscal quarter, the company's data centre sales, which include sales of its AI chips, rose more than 400 per cent year over year.
The company is probably none too keen to support a spec based on rival technologies, according to a report by the TechCrunch.
In a recent report, Gartner estimates that the value of AI accelerators used in servers will total US$21 billion this year, increasing to US$33 billion by 2028.
— Bernama
