NuAxiSemiconductor trade intelligence

[News] NVIDIA, Cisco Target 4× Bandwidth Density With 400G USFP Optical Module; Taiwan Suppliers Eye Gains

What happened

According to Economic Daily News, NVIDIA announced plans for a 400Gb/s-per-lane optical module specification at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, California, and has partnered with Cisco to develop the Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP) specification, designed to support 400Gb/s per lane. NVIDIA and Cisco say the new design is expected to deliver four times the bandwidth density and 1.3 times the power efficiency of existing 200Gb/s-per-lane optics, with a path to 12.8Tb/s of total capacity; the companies plan to establish an open industry specification, potentially encouraging adoption by major cloud providers and creating opportunities in the pluggable optical module market. Economic Daily News highlights Luxnet and PCL Technologies as potential beneficiaries. The 4x and 1.3x figures are company expectations, and the event remains at the planning/specification stage. The report also notes: Meta is adopting NVIDIA's Spectrum-6 switch chips for the IceCube platform in its next-generation IcePack liquid-cooled network racks; NVIDIA's standalone Vera CPU MGX racks have entered mass production and begun shipping, are manufactured on TSMC's 3nm node and, per the report, deliver 50% higher performance and twice the performance per watt compared with conventional x86 CPUs; Commercial Times identifies 12 Taiwanese Vera CPU MGX rack partners, including Foxconn, Quanta subsidiary QCT, Wistron, Wiwynn, Inventec, Compal, Pegatron, MiTAC, ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, and ASRock subsidiary ASRock Rack; and NVIDIA is opening up its Vera Rubin rack and compute tray designs under the third-generation MGX 1.2 specification, whose modular liquid-cooling design eliminates internal cables, hoses, and fans from compute trays, reducing assembly and maintenance times from hours to minutes, while supporting up to 5,000 amperes to increase power density.