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Marvell already supplies a good portion of the high-speed interconnects for AI projects from Dell and HPE
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Marvell is making custom AI chips for AWS and others
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The company told Silverlinings they will reveal more details about their custom AI chip customers at Mobile World Congress
Marvell is shaping up to be an artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouse behind the throne of high-profile players on the AI silicon scene, such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
“In essence, Marvel wants to be the AI connector at the edge of the processor to make it all work,” Jack Gold, principal analyst at J.Gold Associates. “To make AI work, you need a lot of high-bandwidth interconnect, like to high-speed memory and peripherals... They want to be seen as the premier provider in [this] AI high-speed on-board memory and peripheral bus space.”
The leap would be a natural one for the chip maker. Marvel already supplies all the major companies building AI systems. “Think integrators like Dell, Supermicro and HPE [and more],” Gold said. He noted that AMD and Nvidia both have high-speed networking components but these are mostly used internally.
“To date, most of our AI sales have revolved around optical chips to power modules inside data center,” a Marvell spokesman told us. “We have a large marketshare here. Fabricated Knowledge puts it conservatively at 70 plus [percent], I believe. “
The spokesman said that Marvell also sells a lot of coherent digital signal processors (DSPs) — or modules connecting physically disparate data centers — and switches. “But, as you can imagine, these carry general purpose and AI traffic," he said.
In addition, analysts noted that Marvell is building custom ASICs for Amazon and the like. “Their custom ASIC business designs AI accelerators for customers such as AWS/Amazon and others,” Leonard Lee, executive analyst at neXt Curve told us in an email.
"It would not be much of a stretch to see Marvell providing customized chips to AWS for their cloud instances," Gold commented.
Marvell said that they will talk more at Mobile World Congress in a few short weeks. Rest assured we'll be in Barcelona to get any scoop.