Chapter 14 completed the hardware context for the entire course. Each GPU generation ships with a different NVLink bandwidth, a different NVSwitch generation inside the node, and the same PCIe constraint for non-SXM form factors -- these three parameters determine the fabric decisions upstream of everything you've learned in Chapters 0 through 13.
NVLink bandwidth has grown from 300 GB/s per GPU (NVLink 2 / V100) to 1.8 TB/s (NVLink 5 / B200), doubling roughly every two years. NVSwitch silicon has tracked one generation behind, providing enough aggregate switch bandwidth to saturate all GPUs in the node simultaneously. SXM form factor is the prerequisite for full NVLink participation; PCIe form factor GPUs face a hard bandwidth ceiling that only grows with PCIe generation.
GH200's NVLink-C2C eliminates the CPU-GPU PCIe bottleneck by placing both dies on a single package with coherent memory access at 900 GB/s -- a different solution to the memory bandwidth problem than adding more DDR channels. H100 CNX takes the opposite approach, co-packaging GPU and NIC on one module to reduce PCIe hops for InfiniBand-only workloads.
MIG partitions a single GPU into up to 7 isolated instances, with SR-IOV providing the corresponding network isolation via VFs on the ConnectX-7. Confidential Computing adds hardware-enforced memory encryption that improves tenant isolation at the cost of host observability -- a tradeoff you'll encounter in cloud GPU deployments.