The 400G/lane project represents the next step in Ethernet’s bandwidth evolution. The Ethernet Alliance will continue its ecosystem work in 2026, demonstrating interoperability at multiple events and organizing another 200G/lane plugfest.
Ultra Ethernet adapts to evolving AI workloads
Following the release of its 1.0 specification, the Ultra Ethernet Consortium is tackling three technical priorities in 2026 aimed at improving Ethernet performance for AI and HPC workloads. The first is Programmable Congestion Management (PCM).
“AI and HPC workloads are rapidly evolving,” Chad Hintz, co-chair of marketing at UEC and principal member of technical staff at AMD, told Network World. “To address these rapid changes, flexible congestion management mechanisms are required.”
PCM will enable anyone to implement a new congestion control algorithm using a standard language, and that algorithm will work on any NIC that supports UE PCM.
The UEC is also standardizing Congestion Signaling (CSIG), which allows packets to carry high-fidelity information about network congestion. This enables the transport protocol to react more accurately and quickly to changing conditions.
The second priority addresses small message performance. The Ultra Ethernet Transport (UET) 1.0 protocol is designed to support up to a million hosts coordinating as part of a single job. To achieve this scale, a basic UET packet has 104 bytes of headers. That overhead is just 2.5% for 4096-byte packets but becomes more significant for smaller transactions like 256-byte transfers. The smaller packet overhead will improve efficiency for workloads with small payloads, whether HPC workloads or local scale-up networks.
