First live XPO transicever demo for me at least at the Amphenol booth. A liquid cooled (liquid plate) 64 channels transceiver running at 224G/lane PAM4. Solid BER readings for a first attempt at XPO across all 64 channels. This is without FEC. The module is plugged into a makeshift (as in it has only one XPO channel port) Arista switch with a liquid cooling mechanism connecting to the bottom of the XPO transceiver cage. The electrical I/O from the gold fingers to the switch asic is connected with an CPC (co-packaged copper cable) so more copper content. Now imagine 8 of these inside a switch, we would be at 100T per switch. You would neee also 8 CPC per switch, and a more complex liquid cooling system. But in theory and so far in practice, XPO seems to work well. The Amphenol person at the booth said this is capable or rivaling NPO. It will all depend on what kind of technology end customers choose to adopt eventually, so pluggables are fine and imho, Andy Bechtolsheim has done it again.

This is super refreshing! Apple's new head of hardware engineering Tom Marieb, when asked about the crease getting bigger over time on the Duo, says, "Hold us accountable to that, please." Never heard that one before.

The choice of optical interconnect architecture has significant implications for bandwidth, power, cost, and deployment flexibility as GPU clusters grow in size and complexity. Pluggable optics offer ecosystem maturity and operational simplicity. Co-packaged optics offer bandwidth density and power efficiency. Near-packaged optics sits between the two. At @ECOC_Exhibition, Marvell Vice President of Connectivity Lian Qin will present a comparative analysis of all three approaches, examining performance, power consumption, serviceability, ecosystem readiness, and total cost of ownership, and exploring how NPO addresses the evolving requirements of AI scale-up infrastructure. Learn more:

I met @siliconcodesign this morning and had a short conversation with him. He has real technical insight and actually understands the technology, unlike people who just talk without much substance. Follow him now and check out his X and Substack. I am confident he is going to become one of the bigger accounts in this space!!!!!

How do I learn about a technology or a company? I talk to the experts building the products and approach them like a student. Consider yourself the idiot ont he subject and they are the expert. I am from the industry so we can skip first principles (as people here love to excessively use the term). I ask the expert to explain what they are building, then ask questions to challenge them but also with the main goal of learning more. I try to understand why they believe in what they’re doing. I don’t approach them assuming they are wrong and looking to prove it, and I can see more of that going on.

How do I learn about a technology or a company? I talk to the experts building the products and approach them like a student. Consider yourself the idiot ont he subject and they are the expert. I am from the industry so we can skip first principles (as people here love to excessively use the term). I ask the expert to explain what they are building, then ask questions to challenge them but also with the main goal of learning more. I try to understand why they believe in what they’re doing. I don’t approach them assuming they are wrong and looking to prove it, and I see more of that going on.

I love that this point got discussed, that connectors have a higher likelihood of failing than the lasers themselves. Google and Meta said at OFC earlier this year that lasers are not the main cause of failure in the system. Rang-Chen Yu from TeraHop reiterated that point as well.

From the Cignal AI “Active Insights Forum - ECOC 2026” hosted by @aschmitt. Their Lead Analyst Scott Wilkinson made a very valid point that Arista $ANET are known for not being a big fan of CPO. Andy Bechtolsheim helped with the creation of the XPO MSA as an answer for CPO, but it seems Arista are a fan of NPO. For those who are learning about this side of the industry, NPO is disaggregated from the switch ASIC. In a sense, Arista or any switch vendor still have a say in what kind of optics goes into or inside their boxes, and how it is cooled. As Rang-Chen from TeraHop just mentioned on the webinar, this is a key advantage of deploying NPO versus tightly integrated CPO, because you can actually have separate cooling for the optics and the switch ASIC. I look forward to going to the TeraHop booth to check their demo out.

Our next @FundaAI Spanish Happy Hour (as in it starts at 8:00 pm) will be in Malaga, Spain during the ECOC Exhibition next week on the 22nd. If you are around, please come and we can grab a drink. RSVP on the link below in the comments:

For those who don't know, the Open CPX MSA is standardizing the electrical/mechanical/optical interface for compact CPO engines like Lightmatter’s Passage L20 so vendors can place high BW optical I/O very close to the XPU and use it for scale-up fabrics without every accelerator platform needing a proprietary optical engine implementation. Sp for scale-up specifically, it offers shorter electrical reach + optical links right beside the accelerator which translates to more bandwidth density and lower I/O power across large multi-XPU systems.

New cat alert! A call from a wildlife sanctuary about a "weird cat" has led to the first new cat species discovered in over 100 years in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion. Learn more about this feline surprise: