With Thor 2, Broadcom Wants To Become The AI Network Adapter
The Next Platform, Tuesday, May 28th, 2024
Aside from all of the buzz that optics get in datacenter networking, copper is still king of the short haul. The reason is simple: Those optical transceivers that link servers to switches and switches to each other over the short-haul row and long haul datacenter distances are crazy stupid expensive.
And they also fail in the field enough to screw up massive HPC simulation and AI training runs.
And so the trick to technical and economic success is to only use optics when you absolutely have to and to stick with copper wiring and devices that can drive it as directly as possible under whatever circumstances there are given the systems used.