Broadcom's chip unit unveiled a new networking processor that aims to speed artificial intelligence data crunching, which requires stringing together hundreds of chips that work together.

But not everyone agrees that a new protocol is necessary or is willing to wait for the first UALink hardware to be taped out. Once a founding member of the UALink consortium, Broadcom now believes that Ethernet is more than capable of getting the job done sooner.

According to Broadcom, Tomahawk Ultra achieves a switch latency of 250 nanoseconds at a full 51.2 terabits per second of throughput. It supports line-rate switching for packets as small as 64 bytes and can handle up to 77 billion packets per second.