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.