Astera Labs debuts Scorpio fabric switch to accelerate PCIe for AI, cloud

The P series fabric switch is designed to optimize data transfer between various components of an AI server.

“The biggest use case is NIC-to-GPU data ingest,” Danesh said. “How do you get from the scale-out network into the GPU so you can maximize GPU utilization, keep the GPU fed with data, as well as getting it back out?”

Danesh explained that the fundamental job of the P series Scorpio is being able to provide high performance peer-to-peer traffic from the GPU to all of its key resources, whether it’s the CPU, the NICs, the SSDs.

The X series targets scale-up clusters, facilitating high speed GPU-to-GPU communication. Unlike general-purpose switches, the X series offers platform-specific customizations.

“We can actually do platform-specific customization, depending on the different GPU, to really eke out performance, eke out the best bandwidth efficiency as well as the highest reliability,” Danesh said.

How the Scorpio switch fabric is deployed

While Astera Labs refers to Scorpio as a switch fabric, the actual technology the company currently provides is the silicon and software.