Timing devices company, SiTime, launched Elite 2 Super-TCXO for more efficient GPU and compute management in AI data centres.
“Industry reports show GPU utilisation in AI clusters can be as low as 20-40%, a large and largely hidden tax on AI infrastructure,” said Piyush Sevalia, chief business officer at SiTime. “AI workloads are distributed across GPUs in tightly orchestrated time slots. Even small timing errors force wait cycles to avoid data corruption, and in extreme cases can trigger GPU timeouts and system restarts. Poor synchronization directly caps GPU utilisation.”
Sevalia continued, “To address this, the industry is driving towards a target of 10 nanoseconds time synchronisation across an AI cluster, down from one microsecond today. We collaborated closely with leading AI system architects at hyperscalers and silicon providers and concluded that the right oscillator can significantly improve cluster‑wide synchronization. That’s why we developed the Elite 2 Super-TCXO. The device delivers sub-nanosecond synchronisation, 10X better than target, which is enabled by its exceptional thermal and short-term stability. With these characteristics, Elite 2 minimises time errors between GPUs, unlocking higher system utilization, greater throughput and better performance per watt. This is the result of SiTime leadership and systems thinking, applied to one of AI’s hardest problems.”
“AI networks must operate with extremely high efficiency to fully utilize expensive GPU resources,” said Sameh Boujelbene, VP at Dell’Oro Group. “As AI back-end infrastructure refreshes at a much faster cadence than traditional non-accelerated infrastructure, time synchronization accuracy becomes increasingly important to sustaining performance across rapidly evolving data centre architectures.”
Elite 2 Super-TCXO delivers better synchronization in a small footprint. Among its key features are 1ns time synchronisation accuracy, frequency (f) temperature slope of ±2ppb/°C dF/dT and f stability of ±50ppb over -40 to 105°C, in a footprint of 8mm². The Elite 2 Super-TCXO with commercial production is scheduled for later this year.
