Cisco, Nvidia team up to build fatter, faster pluggable

AI datacenters are a rats nest of fiber optic cables stitching together thousands of AI accelerators, NICs, switches, and everything else required to train and run the latest and greatest modes. Cisco hopes to untangle this mess with a new pluggable optic developed in collaboration with Nvidia that will pack between four and eight times the bandwidth of existing pluggables into a single port. Announced at the Open Compute Project (OCP) global summit this week, the ultra-dense small form factor pluggable (USFP) promises to pack up to 32, 400 Gbps lanes into a pluggable roughly the size of existing OSFP modules. Each of these pluggables would boast 12.8 Tbps of Ethernet bandwidth, as much as a high-end enterprise switch just a few years ago. To put that in perspective, the most sophisticated pluggable optics today cap out at around 1.6 Tbps using eight 200 Gbps links. …