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Apple has joined a consortium developing next-generation technology aimed at linking together chips in AI data centers. The Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink) is working on a standard called UALink, which connects the AI accelerator chips found within a growing number of server farms.
As part of the consortium’s board, Apple joins fellow members Alibaba and semiconductor company Synopsys, along with other industry leaders such as Intel, AMD, Google, AWS, Microsoft, and Meta. The absence of Nvidia from this group is notable, given its significant presence in the AI accelerator chip market. However, it seems that Nvidia has opted to utilize its proprietary interconnect tech, NVLink, for linking chips within a data center cluster.
Apple’s participation in UALink comes as the company expands its investments in infrastructure to support Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI product features. According to reports, Apple is reportedly developing a new server chip aimed at improving the efficiency of its AI data centers. Some of Apple’s AI capabilities have received mixed reviews, with one capability being met with criticism for providing inaccurate news summaries.
UALink aims to connect chips ranging from GPUs to custom-designed solutions in order to speed up the training, fine-tuning, and running of AI models.
Source: techcrunch.com
