448 Gbps SERDES Lanes Are Just Around The Corner
The industry’s biggest players are driving the AI Market Infrastructure towards Ethernet, as key players come together this week in Santa Clara.
The Ethernet Alliance is currently hosting a two-day event to discuss the Ethernet ecosystem and the growing demands for higher speeds. How will AI networks scale-out and scale-up and ultimately evolve, and what will the future requirements of 448 Gb/s SERDES have on the market?
The first day event keynotes included Ram Huggahalli of Microsoft discussing the challenges they are facing, with similar perspectives from Moray McLaren of Google. It is a true positive for the industry when Hyperscalers have their voices heard early in the standards process. On Tuesday, we will see Nicolaas Viljoen of Meta (Facebook) speak. Also, 650 Group will be hosting a panel on the future of Electrical Signaling.
It is clear that as time marches forward, network racks will continue to ‘densify’, and the power requirements per rack will approach 1MW. These trends will lead to a significant increase in Ethernet switch ports. The industry will need to figure out how Ethernet evolves for both the scale-out and scale-up back-end networks, as each will have different requirements for distance, speed, FEC, and latency.
Overall, Ethernet AI Networking will quickly become a +$10B incremental market for Ethernet Switching, which is one of the key reasons why Ethernet switching is now the second largest market for IT spending, only behind servers. Ethernet switching in hyperscale data centers is now much larger than the Telco market and has recently passed the size of the Storage market. Lastly, a big shout-out to John D’Ambrosia and the Ethernet Alliance team for setting this up.