Meta helped design a chip for its own network, but you’ll never be able to buy it
- Meta and Marvell Technology are jointly designing new chip hardware
- FBNIC wants to increase internal networking opportunities at Meta
- However, the chip will probably never go on commercial sale
A collaboration between Meta and Marvell Technology has resulted in the development of a powerful new network chip.
The chip, called FBNIC, is designed with the aim of improving Meta’s internal networking capabilities, reducing downtime and increasing overall efficiency.
Announced at the OCP Global Summit 2024, FBNIC claims to offer significant performance improvements, but it won’t be available for commercial sale anytime soon.
A tailor-made approach for networking
The partnership created a custom Network Interface Controller (NIC), developed using a 5nm process, combining custom firmware, software and hardware to deliver optimized network performance, aimed at helping Meta streamline its networking operations.
The FBNIC chip supports a wide range of Ethernet network interfaces, allowing Meta’s infrastructure to handle large amounts of data with high-speed connections, making it ideal for the massive scale of the company’s operations – especially when AI is taken into account.
It also comes with a multi-host PCIe interface, which supports four independent Gen5 x4 ports, allowing the chip to communicate efficiently across multiple servers. Additionally, the custom firmware control provides access to all hardware internals, allowing Meta to tailor the chip’s performance to its specific needs.
In addition to developing FBNIC for its use, Meta has chosen to contribute the board design to the Open Compute Project (OCP), an initiative aimed at promoting open-source hardware designs for data centers.
“The future of large-scale data center computing will increasingly revolve around optimizing semiconductors and other components for specific applications and cloud infrastructure architectures,” said Raghib Hussain, President of Products and Technologies at Marvell.
“It was exciting to work with Meta to develop their custom FBNIC on our industry-leading 5nm accelerated infrastructure silicon platform. We look forward to the OCP community using the board design for future innovations.”
Via HPC wire
