Broadcom Thor Ultra Ethernet NIC at Hot Chips 2026

Broadcom is now on stage at Hot Chips 2026 with the Thor Ultra Ethernet NIC, an 800GbE adapter aimed squarely at AI and HPC fabrics. This Thor Ultra family launched earlier this year, and this session goes deeper on the design behind it.

This one we are doing live, so please excuse any typos.

Broadcom Thor Ultra Ethernet NIC at Hot Chips 2026

Broadcom is setting the stage for Thor Ultra. Ethernet here spans scale-up in the rack, scale-out across racks, and scale-across between data centers, and each layer drives a shared set of NIC requirements. Each needs high bandwidth, enhanced RDMA, low latency, and QoS, joined by virtualization, security, timing, telemetry, and diagnostics. It is a little bit awkward given what NVIDIA’s framewrok will look like later in this session block.

Thor Ultra pairs a PCIe Gen6 x16 host interface…