At that point you could just breakout the thunderbolt to PCIe and use a regular NIC. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's all that to the Atto Thunderlink, a case around a broadcom nic.

Then you _just_ need the driver. Fascinating, Apple ships MLX5 drivers, that's crazy imo. I understand that's something they might need internally, but shipping that on ipadOs is wild. https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/05/17/25gbit/s-on-macos-ios/

That is what I am suggesting with the Atto adapter.

Infiniband is way faster and lower latency than a NIC. These days NIC==Ethernet.