Intelligent ConnectX-5 adapter cards, the newest additions to the Mellanox Smart Interconnect suite, support co-design and in-network compute. They introduce new acceleration engines for maximizing high performance, web 2.0, cloud, data analytics, and storage platforms.

ConnectX-5 with virtual protocol interconnect supports two ports of 100 Gb/s InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity, sub-600 nanosecond latency, and a very high message rate. It also features PCIe switch and NVMe over fabric offloads, providing the highest performance and most flexible solution for the most demanding applications and markets.

ConnectX-5 enables higher HPC performance with new message passing interface (MPI) offloads, such as MPI tag matching and MPI all-to-all operations, advanced dynamic routing, and new capabilities to perform various data algorithms.

Moreover, ConnectX-5 accelerated switching and packet processing (ASAP2™) technology enhances offloading of virtual switches, such as Open V-Switch (OVS), resulting in significantly higher data transfer performance without overloading the CPU. Together with native RDMA and RoCE support, ConnectX-5 dramatically improves cloud and NFV platform efficiency.

Mellanox offers an alternate ConnectX-5 Socket Direct™ card to enable 100 Gb/s transmission rate for servers without x16 PCIe slots. The adapter's 16-lane PCIe bus is split into two 8-lane buses, with one bus accessible through a PCIe x8 edge connector and the other bus through an x8 parallel connector to an auxiliary PCIe connection card. The two cards are connected using a dedicated harness. Additionally, the card improves performance by enabling direct access from each CPU in a dual-socket server to the network through its dedicated PCIe x8 interface.