@intjudo I believe that the Aries smart cable allows GPU clusters to be connected on multiple floors because the cables can be wired through the ceiling or the floor, and the cable extends now up to seven meters. This allows data centers to be built more vertically or have more floors in general rather than being very wide.
Aries SCMs extend high-bandwidth PCIe 5.0 and CXL signal reach beyond the rack at 128 GB/s for up to 7 meters to enable larger GPU clusters in a multi-rack architecture
I would add the Aries cable are only one variation of one product, in a family of four products which speed up different aspects such as data and memory. Recalling from previous conferences I believe they said they can optimize down to the silicon and GPU level, and their products range from connecting GPU clusters along with optimzing GPUs themselves. Since some of their deals are under NDA agreements it is kind of hard to figure out the exact nature of amount of “content” in Nvidia products.
I am somewhat amazed that the company came out with Scorpio so fast to become a revenue generator already where they said that 10%+ of revenue next year will be from this product. It seems Astera’s go to market strategy combined with R&D is extremely strong, and their innovations can play in a wide variety of GPU cluster designs. It would be interesting to know what innovations Astera may have in store for liquid cooled solutions.