Intel Almost Killed Off Omni-Path. Now A Partner Says The Tech Is Winning Against Nvidia.

After Intel nearly killed off the Omni-Path high-speed interconnect and spun it off into a new company several years ago, a systems integration partner says the InfiniBand alternative is starting to take off with high-performance computing customers amid a renewed AI push.

Dominic Daninger said it’s hard to forget all the times Intel introduced a new technology, only to back out of it a few years later. After all, his midwestern systems integration business, Nor-Tech, invested time and money to support at least some of those.

“One of the things with Intel we’ve seen so many times [was] that they were out there a year or two with a particular product line, and if it’s not sticking, it’s gone,” said Daninger, vice president of engineering for the Burnsville, Minn.-based company, in a recent CRN interview.

While many of these products, including Intel’s Xeon Phi processors, are now consigned to the semiconductor giant’s long list of past attempts to diversify beyond its traditional CPU business, one of them has found not only new life under a different company but a way to challenge Nvidia’s dominance of the AI infrastructure market.

This is Omni-Path, the high-speed interconnect technology Intel developed as an alternative to InfiniBand, the rival fabric that is the basis for scale-out networking products from Nvidia by way of its $7 billion Mellanox acquisition in 2020.

But whereas Nvidia saw the potential for a high-speed interconnect technology to create data center-scale computers and diversify its business with the Mellanox deal, Intel decided to get out of the business around the same time.

How Omni-Path Came Back From A Near-Death Experience

After revealing Omni-Path back in 2014, Intel made a push for the first generation of products with channel partners in the high-performance computing space. But a few years later, the chipmaker signaled that it was pulling back from the product line when it discontinued development of the second-generation Omni-Path architecture in 2019. It also made first-gen parts available on a build-to-order basis, partners said at the time.

Daninger said the move was disappointing, given that his company Nor-Tech had “spent quite a bit of time as a test bed” for Omni-Path and “saw some benefits from it.”

But after the end seemed nigh for Omni-Path, a new company called Cornelis Networks spun out of Intel in 2020 with possession of intellectual property, product inventory, support agreements and distribution agreements related to the technology.

In exchange, Intel’s venture capital arm, Intel Capital, received a stake in the spin-off, and the two companies now work together as complementary vendors.

With funding from Intel Capital and other investment firms, Cornelis revitalized the Omni-Path road map with an eye towards Ethernet compatibility, made a big sales hiring push, launched a new partner program and last year launched the first set of new products that the company said has better performance and price-performance than InfiniBand- or Ethernet-based offerings.

While the Wayne, Pa.-based company has ambitions to win over hyperscalers in due time, it nevertheless sees the channel as a significant part of its growth plan, even going so far as allocating supply for its systems integration partners, as CRN recently reported.

The company is also doubling down on the channel by allocating supply for its systems integration partners, as CRN recently reported.

Nor-Tech Is ‘Selling A Fair Amount’ Of Omni-Path Products Now

Now, Daninger said, Nor-Tech is “selling a fair amount” of Cornelis’ Omni-Path products.

“In the last year or so, we’ve been doing a good amount of business with them,” he said, declining to disclose how much his company has made selling Omni-Path.

The executive noted that Omni-Path products can offer significant savings in upfront costs compared to Nvidia’s InfiniBand-based networking products.

For instance, he said, a roughly $500,000 HPC cluster project he’s working on for an HVAC company is expected to save $30,000 to $40,000 in the overall purchase price by going with Omni-Path instead of a comparable InfiniBand option.

Daninger said the savings can be even higher for smaller clusters because of how the networking fabric ends up representing a larger share of the overall cost.

“We’ve seen [Omni-Path] be a factor of maybe up to 15 percent or something like that in savings,” he said.

It helps that Cornelis is focused on small- to mid-sized clusters whereas Nvidia has made larger data centers a priority, according to Daninger.

“There was a point in time where, if you go back four or five years ago, Mellanox had some smaller InfiniBand switches. You just don’t see those from Nvidia. They’re more interested in top of the rack in the data center and even larger than that,” he said.

As Intel now embarks on a retooled AI strategy under CEO Lip-Bu Tan that includes rack-scale systems, Daninger said Cornelis’ momentum is Intel’s loss.

“Cornelis now is spending enough time and money there that the product is really working pretty well,” he said. “It could have been Intel’s gain, except they walked away from it.”

An Intel spokesperson declined to comment.

Cornelis CEO Expects Next Generation To Represent Inflection Point

In an interview with CRN last month, Cornelis CEO Lisa Spelman said that she expects the company’s next generation of Omni-Path products, the 800-Gbps CN6000 family, to represent an inflection point in terms of customer interest.

While the company has claimed that the current 400-Gbps CN5000 products have strong advantages against comparable InfiniBand and Ethernet offerings, Spelman said she expects the upcoming CN6000 line to have greater appeal for multiple reasons.

For one, the current Omni-Path products are aimed at enterprises, governments and academic institutions, but they “are not a fit” for hyperscalers, according to the CEO, because those kinds of massive data center builders “value interoperability and interchangeable suppliers more than they value performance.”

This is in reference to how the CN5000 products do not work with networking standards, namely Ethernet, for which there are multiple vendors.

But that will start to change with the CN6000 line, which will introduce Ethernet compatibility with support for the widely supported Ultra Ethernet standard as well as RDMA over Converged Ethernet (ROCE) technology. This will allow Ethernet-based networks to access Omni-Path features such as advanced congestion control.

“That industry interoperability is really important,” Spelman said.

She also expects greater momentum with the CN6000 products because they are timed to launch this year alongside AMD’s next-generation data center products, which include the EPYC “Venice” CPU and Instinct MI450 series GPUs. AMD is expected to mount a much larger challenge against Nvidia with these processors, thanks in large part to support from large and influential customers such as OpenAI and Meta.

“We will have the opportunity to be part of the go-to-market with both AMD and the OEMs as they drive that in,” she said.

As Cornelis releases the second generation of Omni-Path products outside of Intel, Spelman thinks the steady cadence of product releases and improvements will encourage adoption by potential customers who have been cautious up until this point.

“So the second generation offers us much broader market access, from my perspective, for that whole host of reasons,” she said.

Analyst: It May Take Time For Cornelis To Prove Itself

Mark Nossokoff, research director at HPC-focused research firm Hyperion Research, told CRN that while Cornelis has solid technology with adoption by several government labs as well as some academic institutions, he has not yet seen a lot of traction among commercial customers in HPC deployments yet. That, he said, could take some time.

“People would love to have an alternative to Nvidia. A viable, strong alternative. They would prefer to not give Nvidia so much of their wallet share, and that takes a couple generations [for a company like Cornelis] to prove,” said Nossokoff.

Cornelis also must contend with other interconnect vendors, including HPE with its Ethernet-based Slingshot technology, which is also building toward Ultra Ethernet support.

However, the analyst said, if Cornelis manages to win a big AI data center deployment alongside AMD with their upcoming products, it could give the vendor an important boost.

“I think that would do wonders for them,” he said.