Couldn't they Just Upgrade
... TOSLink? My Sony PS/2 has already got the connector...
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK)
Copackaged optics have officially found their killer app - of course it's AI
Power is becoming a major headache for datacenter operators as they grapple with how to support ever larger deployments of GPU servers - so much so that the AI boom is now driving the adoption of a technology once thought too immature and failure-prone to merit the risk. We're talking, of course, about co-packaged optical (CPO …
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Sunday 23rd November 2025 00:04 GMT HuBo
Illuminating
Great to see this focus on CPO and related advances imho. AWS saw the light last year and showed a great before-and-after picture of how it vastly cleaned up its rack designs (the beforelast photo). Google's also known for the reconfigurable optical interconnects used around its TPUs ...
One can send multiple signals (at different wavelengths) simultaneously, for example 128+ of them using a single ChromX laser, and do so in both directions (BiDi) at once, on a single fiber, without a need to wrap the cable in grounded foil thanks to inherent galvanic isolation. So, the throughput can be formidable, even with very few physical links.
It's super that Nvidia, Broadcom, Ayar, and even AMD (eg. Enosemi purchase) are getting to the point of deploying this tech in the field, finally! Quite notable also that Lightmatter's Passage is a reconfigurable optical interposer (iirc) which should help orchestrate throughput in response to workload, if needed. It's been a long wait ...
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Sunday 23rd November 2025 09:45 GMT peteC7x
Well, not entirely true….
Because at some point you need to plug the cable to some patch panel or whatever. So, that claim that this is the end of pluggable cables is toral bull crap to sell over priced crap that at some point soon will be a loss once this whole bullshit AI fever comes to a sweet loving end. CAN HARDLY WAIT!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
