Accelerated Ethernet Switching for AI and the Cloud
Introduction
NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet Switches
NVIDIA Spectrum™ Ethernet switches accelerate networking for all layers of software and hardware. Fully standards-based Ethernet, they power NVIDIA Spectrum-X™ Ethernet for AI and support both traditional, pluggable, optical connectivity and groundbreaking co-packaged silicon photonics networking. Spectrum Ethernet switches enable operational efficiency with a wide variety of network operating system choices, including NVIDIA Cumulus™ Linux and Pure SONiC. Spectrum Ethernet switches also offer innovative digital twins with NVIDIA DSX™ Air and intelligent AIOps and full-stack observability through NVIDIA Minerva™.
Benefits
Spectrum Switch Portfolio Features
Accelerated
Best-in-class hardware performance with zero-touch accelerated RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
Innovative
New silicon photonics switches for enhanced resiliency, power efficiency, and uptime for AI
Optimized
Designed and tested for full-stack, end-to-end NVIDIA solutions
Open
Choice and flexibility at all tiers of the stack through open NOS support
Simulated
Hosted data center simulation for end-to-end AI infrastructure
Reliable
Exclusive features that enable fairness, predictability, and actionable visibility
New Co-Packaged Silicon Photonic Networking Switches to Scale to Millions of GPUs, Multi-Site AI Factories
Products
Spectrum Ethernet Switch Hardware
Highlights
Max Port Speed
800Gb/s
Max Flow Counters
512Kentries
Max Access-Control Lists (ACLs)
512Kentries
Network Address Translation (NAT)
100K+entries
Max IPV4 Routes
512Kentries
Product Tables
Ethernet Switch Family
-
SN6000
-
SN5000
-
SN4000
-
SN3000
-
SN2000
| Connectors | 800Gb/s Ports | 400Gb/s Ports | 200Gb/s Ports | 100Gb/s Ports | Height | Max Throughput | |
| SN6810-LD | 128x MMC-12 (co-packaged optics) | 128 | 256 | 512 | 512 + 2 | 2U | 102.4 Tb/s |
| SN6800-LD | 512x MMC-12 (co-packaged optics) | - | - | 2,048 | 2,048 + 8 | 5U | 409.6 Tb/s (4x 102.4 Tb/s) |
| SN6600-LD | 64x OSFP 2x 800 Gb/s | 128 | 256 | 512 | 512 + 2 | 2U | 102.4 Tb/s |
| SN6600 | 64x OSFP 2x 800 Gb/s | 128 | 256 | 512 | 512 + 2 | 3U | 102.4 Tb/s |
| SN6200-LD | 32x OSFP 2x 800GbE
+ 256x 200G ports connected to backplane |
-* | -* | 256* | 256* + 2 | 1U | 102.4 Tb/s |
*Front-facing ports only; back-facing ports are for intra-rack connectivity and are connected to the backplane.
| Connectors | 800GbE Ports | 400GbE Ports | 200GbE Ports | 100GbE Ports | 50GbE Ports | 40GbE Ports | 25/10/1GbE Ports | Height | Max Throughput | Total Packets per Second | |
| SN5610 | 64x OSFP 800GbE + 2 SFP28 25GbE | 64 | 128 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 128 | 256 + 2 | 2U | 51.2Tb/s | 33.3Bpps |
| SN5600 | 64x OSFP 800GbE + 1 SFP28 25GbE | 64 | 128 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 128 | 256 + 1 | 2U | 51.2Tb/s | 33.3Bpps |
| SN5600D | 64x OSFP 800GbE + 1 SFP28 25GbE | 64 | 128 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 128 | 256 + 1 | 2U | 51.2Tb/s | 33.3Bpps |
| SN5400 | 64x QSFP-DD 400GbE + 2x SFP28 25GbE | — | 64 | 128 | 256 | 256 | 128 | 256 + 2 | 2U | 25.6Tb/s | 33.3Bpps |
| Connectors | 400GbE Ports | 200GbE Ports | 100GbE Ports | 50GbE Ports | 40GbE Ports | 25/10/1GbE Ports | Height | Max Throughput | Total Packets per Second | |
| SN4600C | 64x QSFP28 100GbE | — | — | 64 | 128 | 64 | 128 | 2U | 6.4Tb/s | 8.4Bpps |
| SN4700 | 32x QSFPDD 400GbE | 32 | 64 | 128 | 128 | 64 | 128 | 1U | 12.8Tb/s | 8.4Bpps |
| Connectors | 200GbE Ports | 100GbE Ports | 50GbE Ports | 40GbE Ports | 25/10/1GbE Ports | Height | Max Throughput | Total Packets per Second | |
| SN3420 | 12x QSFP28 100GbE +
48x SFP28 25GbE |
— | 12 | — | 12 | 48+48 | 1U | 2.4Tb/s | 3.57Bpps |
| Connectors | 100GbE Ports | 50GbE Ports | 40GbE Ports | 25/10/1GbE Ports | Height | Max Throughput | Total Packets per Second | |
| SN2201 | 48x RJ45
+ 4x QSFP28 100GbE |
4 | 8 | 4 | 16 (25/10G),
48 (1G) |
1U | 448Gb/s | 667Mpps |
Software
Spectrum Networking Software
OEM Partners
Who We’re Working With
Next Steps
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Discover Networking for the Era of AI
The network is ultimately responsible for AI performance, acting as the backbone of the data center to harness the power of generative AI..
Learn About the Spectrum-X Ethernet Platform
The Spectrum-X Ethernet platform is designed specifically to improve the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI infrastructure.
NVIDIA Ethernet Switch FAQs
NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet switches are purpose-built for AI and cloud networking. The portfolio spans four generations (Spectrum through Spectrum-6) at speeds from 100Gb/s to 800Gb/s. It includes the Spectrum-X platform for AI cloud networking, co-packaged silicon photonics support, Cumulus Linux and Pure SONiC OS options, NVIDIA Minerva for AIOps/observability, and DSX Air for data center simulation and digital twins.
NVIDIA Spectrum-6 Ethernet is the next generation of AI networking, purpose-built to scale AI factories through advanced Ethernet switching and storage infrastructure—delivering 102.4 Tbps throughput across up to 128 × 800G ports, enabled by 200G SerDes, co-packaged optics, and AI-optimized fabrics with advanced RoCE features and flexible cooling configurations to maximize data center performance, efficiency, and resilience while lowering costs.
NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet photonics, also known as co-packaged optics, integrates optical components directly with the Spectrum switch ASIC—eliminating traditional pluggable transceivers entirely. The SN6810-LD and SN6800-LD in the SN6000 series are the first Spectrum switches to use co-packaged silicon photonics, using MMC-16 connectors rather than traditional OSFP or QSFP-DD.
NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet photonics (co-packaged optics) integrates optical components directly with the Spectrum switch ASIC, eliminating pluggable transceivers. Benefits include 5x better power efficiency, 63x better signal integrity, and 2x bandwidth per lane versus pluggable designs. By removing the pluggable transceiver—the most common source of optical link failures—it also improves resiliency and simplifies cable management at AI factory scale.
NVIDIA Spectrum switches are the hardware foundation of the Spectrum-X Ethernet platform that combines switches with SuperNICs and networking software into an end-to-end solution purpose-built to deliver the necessary networking performance for AI factories. Spectrum-X Ethernet delivers 1.6x higher network performance than off-the-shelf Ethernet through adaptive routing, congestion control, and performance isolation—making Ethernet viable for tightly coupled, latency-sensitive AI workloads.
NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet switches offer customers a choice for networking operating systems (NOS). NVIDIA Cumulus Linux is the standard NOS for Spectrum switches, offering an enterprise-grade, fully supported Linux-based network OS with a comprehensive feature set—optimized for scale, automation, and integration with modern DevOps toolchains. Other open source NOS options such as SONiC are also supported on Spectrum Ethernet switches, providing maximum flexibility to customize the software stack without a proprietary dependency.
NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet is supported by NVIDIA Minerva, the end-to-end, real-time, AI-native AIOps software platform purpose-built for AI factories. NVIDIA Minerva harnesses full-stack telemetry across GPUs, Spectrum-X Ethernet, NVLink, SuperNICs, DPUs, schedulers, and workloads. It increases AI factory yield through proactive maintenance, agentic debugging, full-stack correlation, noise reduction, and network observability, ensuring Spectrum-X Ethernet delivers the performance and resiliency needed to scale multi-tenant agentic AI factories.
NVIDIA DSX Air is a cloud-based digital twin platform that simulates and validates NVIDIA AI factory infrastructure including Spectrum Ethernet switches. DSX Air simplifies and accelerates Spectrum-X Ethernet deployments, enabling zero-day network design, testing, and automation before hardware deployment to accelerate time to first token.