Broadcom's 51.2 Tbps co-packaged optics ethernet switch enabling 70% power saving in Gen AI clusters

Broadcom is becoming a key part of exponential AI growth in the years of 2023 and 2024, where its high-speed interconnet products are used extensively in today's Gen-AI and such AI server/cloud systems. To address the growing demand of high speed and low power it has announced shipment of its new Bailly, industry’s first 51.2 terabits per sec (Tbps) co-packaged optics (CPO) Ethernet switch. Bailly is made out of eight silicon photonics based 6.4-Tbps optical engines with Broadcom’s best-in-class StrataXGS Tomahawk5 switch chip. Bailly enables the optical interconnect to operate at 70% lower power consumption and delivers an 8x improvement in silicon area efficiency as compared to pluggable transceiver solutions, claims Broadcom. Broadcom explains "optical interconnect is critical for both front-end and back-end networks in large scale generative AI clusters. Today, pluggable optical transceivers consume approximately 50% of system power and constitute more than 50% of the cost of a traditional switch system. The growing bandwidth requirement for the newer generation of GPUs, coupled with the ever-increasing sizes of AI clusters, requires disruptively power-efficient and cost-efficient optical interconnects that extend beyond discrete solutions. Broadcom’s CPO and silicon photonics technology platform, with its high degree of integration, provides the lowest latency, highe...