Cisco CAI-NVL2-H200 | NVLink 2-Way Bridge for H200 NVL GPU, 900GB/s

Q: What is the purpose of the NVLink 2-way bridge for H200 GPUs?
A: The NVLink 2-way bridge provides direct GPU-to-GPU interconnection at 900GB/s bidirectional bandwidth, enabling paired H200 NVL GPUs to communicate with significantly lower latency and higher throughput than PCIe Gen5 alone. This is essential for multi-GPU AI workloads such as large language model inference and training that require fast data exchange between GPUs.

Q: How many H200 NVL GPUs can be connected with this bridge?
A: This 2-way NVLink bridge connects exactly two H200 NVL PCIe GPUs. For configurations requiring more GPUs, a 4-way NVLink bridge (CAI-NVL4-H200) is available to interconnect up to four H200 NVL GPUs in a single server.

Q: Is the CAI-NVL2-H200 compatible with H200 SXM5 GPUs?
A: No, this bridge is designed specifically for H200 NVL PCIe GPUs. H200 SXM5 GPUs utilize a different interconnect topology with integrated NVLink connections via the HGX baseboard and do not require separate bridge accessories.

Q: What performance benefits does NVLink provide over PCIe Gen5?
A: The 900GB/s bidirectional bandwidth of NVLink is approximately 7 times higher than the 128GB/s provided by PCIe Gen5 x16. This enables multi-GPU workloads to scale more efficiently by reducing data transfer bottlenecks between GPUs, particularly for memory-intensive AI and HPC applications.

Q: Can this bridge be used with other NVIDIA GPU models?
A: No, the CAI-NVL2-H200 is specifically engineered for NVIDIA H200 NVL GPUs with the Hopper architecture and 4th generation NVLink. It is not compatible with previous generation GPUs such as A100, H100, or other GPU families.