The tray carries two Broadcom Tomahawk 6 switch chips, each rated at 102.6T. The reason Tomahawk 6 is used rather than Tomahawk Ultra: the current Tomahawk Ultra is a 112G PAM4 SerDes switch with 512 lanes, while Helios uses 224G PAM4 SerDes, so the Ultra does not fit the rack's SerDes requirements.

Because two big switch chips sit in a 1OU tray, the unit is liquid cooled, with internal manifolds feeding liquid to the cooling blocks. The rear panel is long and must blind mate with the Helios rack's high-density fabric connectors, so insertion force is significant and the front levers are correspondingly very long.

The design also uses retimers, which extend signal reach so the rack can reliably scale up internally, between the switch chips and the rear cable connectors. AMD is big on retimers while NVIDIA has worked to remove them, and unlike NVIDIA's push to move fans out of the AI rack, Helios still uses fans and air cooling for some other components in the tray. The site's writer suggested this tray illustrates why the industry will eventually move to co-packaged optics, which would simplify such designs.