NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 MCX654106A-ECAT
2-Port 100Gb/s VPI Adapter, Dual-Slot Socket Direct (2x PCIe x16)
Host Interface
Socket Direct: PCIe 3.0/4.0 x16 via edge connector + PCIe 3.0 x16 via auxiliary card
Port Count
2-port
Port Speed & Connector Type
Up to 100Gb/s per port (HDR100/EDR InfiniBand or 100GbE), QSFP56
Network Protocol / RDMA
VPI: InfiniBand + Ethernet; hardware RDMA (IB) and RoCE v2
Socket Direct
Yes — dual-slot kit (main card + PCIe auxiliary card + 2 harnesses)
Product Description
The NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 MCX654106A-ECAT is a 2-port InfiniBand/Ethernet VPI adapter built as a Socket Direct dual-slot kit — a main ConnectX-6 card plus a PCIe x16 Auxiliary Connection Card joined by two Cabline CA-II Plus harnesses. Socket Direct splits the adapter's PCIe lanes so each CPU socket in a dual-socket server gets its own direct PCIe path to the network, bypassing the inter-CPU link (UPI/QPI) for lower latency and more even CPU utilization. Each of the two QSFP56 ports runs up to 100Gb/s (HDR100/EDR InfiniBand or 100GbE), built on the same ConnectX-6 (MT28908A0-XCCF-HVM) silicon and feature set as the standard x16 cards — hardware RDMA, SR-IOV, GPUDirect RDMA and in-network computing offloads. Socket Direct cards do not support Multi-Host (independent dual-host) operation; they are purpose-built for single-server, dual-socket direct-attach topologies, and are best suited to large dual-socket HPC and AI nodes where NUMA-local network access matters.