Apple joins board of datacentre chip interconnect standard

Apple has been voted onto the board of the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium which is developing a standard for the interconnect for chips in datacentres.

Apple joins with new board members Synopsys, which supplies UALink IP, and Chinese hyperscaler Alibaba Cloud Computing. Since incorporating at the end of October 2024, the UALInk Consortium has grown to more than 65 member companies including AMD and Intel.

The UALink 1.0 Specification will enable up to 200Gbps per lane scale-up connection for up to 1024 accelerators within an AI pod and is expected to be released this quarter. Early IP has already been developed by Synopsys.

Apple’s place on the board will fuel speculation around the development of a datacentre chip with the UALInk interconnect to provide AI services to iPhones. The company currently uses its high end processors in its data centres but is reported to be developing the chip with TSMC in Project ACDC, or Apple Chip in the Data Centre.

The next generation Apple M5 processor, due later this year and built on TSMC’s 3nm N3P process, is also reported to use ‘server grade’ packaging.  

• Taking on Nvidia for datacentre interconnect
• UALInk connects massive AI clusters

“UALink shows great promise in addressing connectivity challenges and creating new opportunities for expanding AI capabilities and demands,” said Becky Loop, Director of Platform Architecture at Apple. “Apple has a long history of pioneering and collaborating on innovations that drive our industry forward, and we’re excited to join the UALink Board of Directors.”

“UALink will be critical in addressing the performance and bandwidth communication demands of hyperscale data centers, enabling the high-speed interconnects needed to scale up pods and clusters,” said Richard Solomon, UALink Board Member and Sr. Staff Product Manager, Synopsys. “As the leading provider of best-in-class interface IP solutions, Synopsys is committed to contributing our expertise to the UALink Consortium to develop high-speed standards enabling the world’s fastest AI accelerator architectures.”

“Alibaba Cloud believes that driving AI computing accelerator scale-up interconnection technology by defining core needs and solutions from the perspective of cloud computing and applications has significant value in building the competitiveness of intelligent computing supernodes,” said Qiang Liu, VP of Alibaba Cloud and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Server Infrastructure.

“The UALink consortium has brought together key members from the AI infrastructure industry to work together to define interconnect protocol which is natively designed for AI accelerators, driving innovation in AI infrastructure. This will strongly promote the innovation of AI infrastructure and improve the execution efficiency of AI workloads, contributing to the establishment of an open and innovative industry ecosystem.”

“We are pleased to welcome Alibaba, Apple and Synopsys to the UALink Consortium Board of Directors,” said Kurtis Bowman, UALink Consortium Board Chair. “Since our incorporation, the Consortium has grown to more than 65 total members, spanning Cloud, Silicon and IP Providers, Software Companies, System OEMs and others. The continued support for the Consortium will help accelerate adoption of this key industry-standard, defining the next-generation interconnect for AI workloads.”