The compound complexity of co-packaged optics
Sunday, December 20, 2020 at 12:53PM Part 1: The OIF’s co-packaging initiative
Large-scale data centres consume huge amounts of power; one building on a data centre campus can consume 100MW. But there is a limit as to the overall power that can be supplied.
Jeff Hutchins
The challenge facing data centre operators is that networking, used to link the equipment inside the data centre, continues to consume more and more power.
That means less power remains for the servers; the compute that does the revenue-generating work.
This is forcing a rethink regarding networking and explains the growing interest in co-packaged optics, a technique that effectively adds optical input-output (I/O) to a chip.
Two industry organisations - the OIF and The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) - have each started work to identify the requirements needed for co-packaged optics adoption.
