From Tom's Hardware, June 15:
A data center that never ends?
While hyperscalers rush
toward expansion amid the swelling demand for AI data centers, Marvell
last week shared its vision for an optical interconnect solution that
can theoretically pool resources between discrete data centers across
thousands of kilometers.
Optical
interconnections are steadily being deployed across the industry, over
both short and long-distance connections, and we're going to be seeing
much more in the future, according to Matt Murphy, Chief Executive at
Marvell, speaking at Computex 2026.
"Imagine
future data centers, a globally optically interconnected data
infrastructure," Murphy said. "These rigid boundaries we have today, and
the systems we have, they begin to disappear. Compute can now be
pooled, memory can be pooled, and infrastructure can be composed
dynamically at scale."
Constrained by distance
Murphy says that workloads no longer fit within one data center, which is why hyperscale cloud service providers increasingly
need to build entire campuses consisting of multiple data centers connected by high-speed links, as clusters are becoming larger than a single data center.
Today, connecting multiple data centers within a single campus is not easy or cheap, but relatively straightforward. However, Marvell envisions that in the future it will need to connect data centers that are located at considerable distances from one another.
This is why Marvell is working on coherent optics and long-haul scale across optical networking technologies,
which will connect data centers separated by thousands of kilometers.
Marvell already has products which enable such connectivity today,
including the Colorz 1600 1.6 Tb/s coherent optical solution based on a
2nm DSP, which targets inter-data-center connectivity and will sample
later this year.
In addition,
Marvell says it will offer the Ara 1.6 Tb/s family of interconnect
solutions for data centers (with 3nm DSPs) as well as the Teralynx T100
102.4 Tb/s Ethernet switch, which supports 512 ports running at 200 Gb/s
or 64 ports running at 1.6 Tb/s.
Murphy
argues that today's architectures are constrained by distance because
of copper interconnects: CPUs sit near memory because latency matters,
GPUs sit near memory because bandwidth matters. As a result, workloads
must be partitioned according to those physical limits. The head of
Marvell claims that once optical interconnects penetrate scale-up
interconnects, scale-up domains will not be limited by copper cable
lengths, and those constraints will begin to disappear.
Nowadays, scale-up AI solutions, such as Nvidia's NVL72, are connected using copper wires, but scale-out connections tend to use optical interconnects. Once the number of AI accelerators within scale-up systems increases, they will also have to move to optical links, according to Marvell. This means that virtually all data center-grade interconnections will become optical, which might inspire hardware developers to reconsider the architecture of data centers.
Pooling resources
Murphy presented a rather interesting vision: firstly, optics will expand scale-up domains from 72 or 144 accelerators to 1,000 or more. But after that, optical connectivity will enter servers themselves. This will enable developers to disaggregate CPUs, accelerators (Marvell calls them XPUs), and memory into separate pools as distance will no longer matter, enabling better configurability and utilization....
....MUCH MORE
Once more, to quote the grizzled old traders of my youth, "Pay attention or pay the offer."
March 31 - Photonics: "Nvidia Invests $2 Billion in Marvell, Announces Partnership" (MRVL; NVDA)
And many more.
