Comparison of Interconnect Technologies: Hardware, Latency, Lanes, Overhead, Throughput, Vendor, and OS Support
| Interconnect | Hardware Support | Latency | Number of Lanes | Protocol Overhead | True Unidirectional Throughput Per Lane | True Unidirectional Throughput (Overall) | True Bidirectional Throughput | Vendor Support | OS Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVLink | NVIDIA GPUs (Pascal, Volta, Hopper, Blackwell), NVIDIA CPUs (e.g., Grace) | Sub-µs (0.1–0.5 µs, intra-node P2P) | 72 (18 ports × 4 lanes, NVLink 5.0) | ~2.5–3.5% (128b/130b, headers) | 6.09 GB/s (48.72 Gbps) | 438.75 GB/s | 877.5 GB/s | NVIDIA | Linux (primary), Windows (limited via WSL) |
| InfiniBand | CPUs, NVIDIA/AMD/Intel GPUs (via GPUDirect RDMA), NICs (e.g., Mellanox) | ~1–5 µs (point-to-point) | 32 (8 ports × 4 lanes, N |