> The Ariel variant of GB200 NVL72 pairs each NVIDIA Blackwell GPU with an NVIDIA Grace CPU and 2x NVIDIA ConnectX-7 400G NICs at a 1:1 CPU-to-GPU ratio, letting us deploy 800G of I/O per GPU earlier than the rest of the industry

If the 1:1 ratio was purely for I/O (big assumption, very likely wrong), I am curious why they did not just go with ConnectX-8? Other hyperscalers have been shipping NVL72 clusters with ConnectX-8 on roughly the same timeline, and it offers the same 800Gb/s of throughput.

Managing a custom Ariel variant (which seems to be a Meta-only build) is not insignificant complexity, I wonder if they had another need for that 2x CPU-GPU ratio in their workloads relative to the stock GB200s.

EDIT: I looked, the gb200s NVL72s never have shipped with CX-8s, I made this up. This decision could have totally been due to compute availability and timing

IIRC one of the analysts said 1:1 CPU:GPU was for recommendation algorithms and 1:2 is better for LLMs.