Tagged interconnect · show all articles
Every accelerator deal in this cohort assumes the cabling will be there when the chips arrive. Optical fiber and connector lead times now exceed 20 weeks — one more physical constraint hiding behind the gigawatt headlines.
Individual accelerators keep getting faster. The copper connecting thousands of them together increasingly cannot keep up — which is why Nvidia is betting heavily on replacing that copper with light.
Once a model no longer fits on one device, the interconnect stops being plumbing and becomes the design surface. Every way of splitting a model generates its own traffic, and the fabric decides which splits are affordable.
Petaflops are the advertised number and almost never the binding one. An accelerator is a memory system with arithmetic attached, and every serious design decision of the last decade follows from that.