AMD Pensando Pollara 400

Overview

The AMD Pensando Pollara 400 is a shipping 400 Gbps AI NIC with a P4-programmable data plane supporting RoCEv2, Ultra Ethernet-ready RDMA, and custom RDMA transports via the P4 SDK. It ships in two form factors: a PCIe Gen5 card (Pollara400-1Q400P) and an OCP form-factor card that began shipping in Q4 2025. It serves as both a front-end and back-end network interface for AMD Instinct MI3XX GPU deployments.

Key performance claims at OCP Global Summit 2025: 25% better RCCL collective performance versus standard RoCEv2 using Ultra Ethernet intelligent load balancing; 50% improvement in LLM training job completion time under 0.1% packet loss using UEC fast failover and selective acknowledgement; and support for three load balancing modes (switch-side dynamic packet spray, NIC-side UEC packet spray with 128/256 mini-flow entropies, and source-based routing via SRv6/MPLS labels). For multi-plane deployments, the 400 Gbps port splits into four 100 Gbps ports across independent leaf-spine planes, enabling 40% lower switch/optics capex (3,000 vs. 5,000 switches for 100K GPU clusters).