Boosting copper’s reach in the data centre
Monday, August 12, 2024 at 3:58PM Marvell has unveiled a chip that enables copper cables to send 1.6 terabits-per-second (Tbps) of data between equipment in the data centre.
Copper cabling, also referred to as direct attach copper, is the standard interconnect used to connect compute nodes in a server, and between servers when building larger computing systems.
Venu Balasubramonian
Data centre operators prefer to use passive copper cables. A copper cable costs less than an optical cable, a critical consideration when tens of thousands may be used in a large data centre.
Compute servers using the latest processors and AI accelerator chips have increasing input-output (I/O) requirements. This is causing interface speeds between servers, and between servers and switches, to keep doubling—from 400 gigabits to 800 gigabits and soon 1.6Tbps.
Moreoever, with each speed hike, the copper cable’s reach shrinks. A copper cable sending 25 gigabits of data has a reache of 7m, but it is only 2m at 100Gbps and is only 1m at 200Gbps.
