Astera speaks softly and carries a big switch
The Register
Astera Labs introduced Scorpio X, a PCIe 6.0-based fabric switch with 5.12 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth designed as an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for connecting multiple AI accelerators. The switch offers 320 lanes of connectivity and includes in-network compute features like Hypercast, a multicast operation optimized for mixture-of-experts model inference. Production is expected to ramp in the second half of 2026, positioning Scorpio as a vendor-agnostic interconnect option that works with existing accelerators without requiring hardware redesign.
Why it matters
High-speed connectivity without NVLink baggage
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