definition
Scale-up topologies differ: Nvidia all-to-all vs Google torus
A scale-up domain is the tight set of chips communicating at terabytes/second; Nvidia's NVL72 connects 72 GPUs all-to-all, Google's TPU pods reach thousands of chips but use a torus topology where each chip connects only to six neighbors (requiring bounce-through with resource blocking), and Amazon sits between them—while all three are migrating toward dragonfly topologies that mix fully- and partially-connected elements.
definitionpending
Speaker
Dylan PatelEvidence Quote
“Google has a topology that’s a torus. Every chip connects to six neighbors. Nvidia’s 72 GPUs connect all-to-all.”
Source
Dwarkesh Patel Podcast - Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute— Dwarkesh Patel PodcastCreated: 6/13/2026, 3:34:26 AM
My Notes
Loading notes...