SYSTEM Cited by 1 source

FBNIC (Meta NIC module with Meta-design network ASIC)

FBNIC is Meta's first in-house network ASIC, announced at OCP Summit 2024 as a new NIC module that Meta is sharing with the OCP community. It is the silicon response to the ~1 TB/s-per-accelerator injection-bandwidth regime Meta projects for next-generation AI clusters.

Seen in

• sources/2024-10-15-meta-metas-open-ai-hardware-vision — "Finally, we are sharing our new FBNIC, a new NIC module that contains our first Meta-design network ASIC. In order to meet the growing needs of our AI [clusters]."

Why it matters

• Vertical integration at the NIC layer. Meta has historically designed servers (OCP), platforms (Grand Teton), and switches (Wedge). FBNIC extends the in-house silicon story to the network-edge ASIC on the compute node, analogous to AWS Nitro, Azure Boost, or Google's "Titan" in-house silicon traditions at other hyperscalers.
• Companion to the 51T Broadcom/Cisco-ASIC fabric switches. Meta is simultaneously multi-vendor on fabric-switch ASICs (Broadcom + Cisco) and in-house on NIC ASICs — a deliberate split: standardize the edge, maximize competition in the spine.
• DSF endpoint story. Within DSF, FBNIC is one of the endpoint-side silicon options for the Ethernet/RoCE endpoint-facing protocol (alongside NVIDIA, Broadcom, AMD NIC options that DSF is explicitly designed to support).

Caveats

• No public silicon datasheet yet. The post announces FBNIC as the "first Meta-design network ASIC" but does not disclose port counts, packet-processing pipeline, programmability model, or performance numbers.

Related

• systems/meta-dsf-disaggregated-scheduled-fabric — the fabric FBNIC attaches endpoints to.
• systems/fboss-meta-network-os — the NOS controlling the broader fabric FBNIC participates in.
• systems/roce-rdma-over-converged-ethernet — endpoint-facing protocol.
• concepts/injection-bandwidth-ai-cluster — the scaling target that motivates in-house NIC silicon.
• companies/meta.