WuXi Stars Micro System Technologies has introduced three interconnect chips designed for artificial intelligence clusters and servers. The company, founded in 2020, held its first full-stack and brand product launch in Uxi on October 15, demonstrating 12 interconnect chips that are already in mass production alongside new components.
The centerpiece of the presentation was the C82-4G, which the company named the first PCIe 6.0 switch developed in China. It is capable of supporting up to 144 lanes at 64 GT/s per lane, doubling the per-lane speed of PCIe 5.0. The switch utilizes PAM4 signaling and FLIT mode, ensuring non-blocking switching with a latency in the range of 100 nanoseconds, as well as support for fabric networking, CXL memory expansion, and memory pooling. It is designed for internal connections in next-generation AI servers, where switches extend processor PCIe lanes to GPUs, network cards, and solid-state drives.
The second product is an 800G multi-protocol AI network card, which the company positions as the first such development from a Chinese supplier. This card incorporates a PCIe Gen6 switch with 48 lanes, supports 800G line-rate transmission with microsecond-level latency, offloads RoCE v2, and offers programmable congestion control. The company notes that the card is optimized for Hygon processors and next-generation supernode architectures focused on inter-node communication in clusters comprising tens of thousands of accelerators.
The third component presented is a multi-mode RAID chip, created using domestic intelligent capabilities. It supports SAS, SATA, and PCIe 5.0 connections, is compatible with both hard drives and SSDs, features a hardware encryption block, and, according to the company, increases throughput and IOPS by approximately eight times compared to the previous generation.
CEO Guo Erhui emphasized that computing power is a system of tightly coupled components: computation, networking, data storage, power, cooling, and planning. He noted that as clusters grow to tens of thousands of cards, interconnects become the bottleneck. The company reported that its products are already used in the internet, finance, telecommunications, and energy sectors, with stated failure rates for the chips being less than 100 DPPM, and for the boards being less than 500 DPPM.
During the launch, cooperation agreements were signed with Kylin Software, UnionTech, Tencent Cloud, Inspur, H3C, ZTE, and Lenovo. These agreements cover the adaptation of the company's interconnect chips to their operating systems and server platforms. The company stated that future steps include the mass production of the next-generation network card and PCIe 6.0 switch, as well as work on optical interconnects and storage pooling. It should be noted that all stated specifications are company claims and have not undergone independent verification.
