Engineering CPO Is Easy – Scaling It For AI Will Take An Ecosystem
It has taken a lot of dreaming and even more engineering, but the many promises of silicon photonics are starting to make their way into real products in the datacenter.
High-bandwidth and low-latency interconnects are a necessity for GenAI platforms, driving enormous investment to fulfill the promises of superintelligence and its agentic AI killer app.
Scale out networks have used pluggable optical transceivers for decades due to the need for network reach beyond electrical wires.
Now, with co-packaged optics, the optical interconnect is being integrated into datacenter switches and, in the future, compute engines and memory subsystems.
the world is willing to spend enormous amounts of money to fulfill the promises of superintelligence and its agentic AI killer app.
Author summary: Silicon photonics is transforming datacenter products.