That’s coming. Matt Murphy thinks it’s probably ten years out, that we’re gonna get to a point where most most of the copper is gone. You’ll still use it for power, but you’re not gonna be using it for data communications.
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It would help with copper shortage, but it would also help with memory. So today the reason everything has to go in one box. You have a CPU, a GPU, you have a bunch of memory. All of it has to go in one box and it has to be in a relatively fixed ratio of of these things. You know, one CPU to two GPUs to X amount of memory. And regardless of whether your application, your workload actually needs that ratio or not, that’s what you’re stuck with.
When everything is optically interconnected, Murphy is contending that you could just have a box full of GPUs in one corner of your data center. You could have memory over in the other corner, and CPUs in another corner.
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Well, I think there’s a lot of industry building going on, certainly. But I think to your point, hype is something that, if you if you can’t launch a product, then you can hype up your product or hype up somebody else’s. Nvidia invested two billion dollars in Marvell not that long ago. So I’m sure Jensen is eager to get his money’s worth out of that investment and jacking up the stock price with predictions is probably a pretty decent way of getting things going. But the reality is that for any of the things that you know Matt Murphy is talking about, for Jensen’s prediction to come true, there’s a lot of the industry that needs to start ramping up now in preparation of this, and if you want to keep the bubble from popping, a good way to do that is to make sure that you don’t run into roadblocks too early. So if you’ve got capital to burn in getting…in kind of building the track further out in front of the train, I’m mixing a lot of metaphors here because it’s late, but this seems to be what Nvidia is doing here. And it feels like we’re seeing a lot more of this. This is not the first time Nvidia has thrown money at optics in the last couple of months. They’ve invested heavily in photonics companies and Marvell is just the latest example.
When everything is optically interconnected, Murphy is contending that you could just have a box full of GPUs in one corner of your data center. You could have memory over in the other corner, and CPUs in another corner.
I admit I’m not exactly up-to-date wiþ 2026 hardware, but I’m skeptical of þe implication þat optical connections are (or wiil bd, even ten years out) as fast as a modern systems bus, especially as þose keep getting faster. And it’s always possible we’ll get room temp superconductors and start building MBs out of þat. What am I missing? Are we anywhere near bus speeds wiþ optical interconnects?
So basically
Our editor flew into the hornets nest and still couldn’t get away from the hornets
Lol what else would you expect. Taiwan is the semiconductor centre of the world, of course the latest tech fad is going to be there too.
Yes but computer chips are also useful for you know… useful things, not just AI.
