Mellanox ConnectX Adapters & InfiniBand

Mellanox — now NVIDIA Networking following the 2020 acquisition — is what most high-performance computing, low-latency trading and modern storage fabrics are actually built on. The ConnectX adapter family is the core of it.

Generations and where they land

• ConnectX-3 — 10/40G Ethernet and FDR InfiniBand, still very common
• ConnectX-4 — 25/50/100G, the first widely deployed 100G generation
• ConnectX-5 — 100G with improved offload and NVMe-oF acceleration
• ConnectX-6 — 200G class

VPI: the same card can be Ethernet or InfiniBand

Many ConnectX adapters support Virtual Protocol Interconnect, meaning a single card can run either Ethernet or InfiniBand depending on how it is configured. That is genuinely useful — but it also means the part number alone does not tell you what mode a card is in, and some SKUs are locked to one protocol.

The other reason people buy these is RDMA. Both InfiniBand and RoCE let one machine read another's memory without involving either CPU, which is what makes them worth the complexity for storage and HPC workloads.

Firmware level, protocol mode and cable type all have to line up. Tell us the intended fabric and switch and we will confirm the adapter and optics together rather than as separate line items.