Point2 Technology has announced a new data transmission technology that promises to change the landscape of data-sharing, networking in data centers. This is an exciting development that promises to greatly improve efficiency as the need for bandwidth continues to grow at an even higher rate. Incorporating radio frequency capabilities in a data center environment has previously proved challenging. This innovative formula addresses growing data management and processing challenges.
The system isn’t particularly photogenic, but it has some amazing critical components. It includes a digital interface for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), a terahertz-frequency generator, and a down-mixing circuitry that encodes data onto the terahertz carrier. Point2 Technology is using these remarkable technologies as the foundation to create a completely new kind of solution. This innovative solution will go above and beyond existing performance standards for data transmission.
Cutting-Edge Fiber Technology
The bread and butter of Point2 Technology’s offering is in their super smart e-Tube fiber cables. These state-of-the-art cables bundle eight e-Tube fibers, with each fiber running 200 gigabits per second. These cables are amazing in capacity. This makes them a compelling complement or even replacement to the traditional optical fibers that have captured the market for decades.
That second-generation cable is an incredible technical achievement, with fibers as thin as 200 micrometers. These fibers have very low losses, as low as 0.3 decibels per meter. Such streamlined data transmission efficiency is set to deliver organizations meaningful cost savings, as well as the operational wherewithal to be more proactive.
Point2 Technology’s system operates with unparalleled efficiency. That’s because it consumes only one-third of the energy that optical technologies do. What’s more, it does one-third of the work they do, and costs one-third! Additionally, it is said to offer latency numbers that are up to one-thousandth of values achievable by optical alternatives. This winning mix of speed, power efficiency and cost-effectiveness could make Point2 Technology’s solution a truly game-changing offering in the industry.
Manufacturing and Future Prospects
And later this year, Point2 Technology will begin manufacturing chips intended to power a first-of-its-kind 1.6-terabit-per-second cable. This enormous undertaking is a great example of the company’s commitment to innovating the industry’s core data center technology. It seeks to address an increasing demand for higher bandwidth capabilities.
The e-Tube system is based on a single silicon chip. This microchip converts incoming digital information into streaming modulated millimeter-wave frequencies. An integrated photonic antenna then converts these frequencies into correlated spatial modes, dumping them into a corresponding waveguide to efficiently transmit data. We showed e-Tube fibers can more efficiently carry data four meters away at a frequency of 970 GHz. This approach has proven to be agile enough to address the complex demands of today’s data centers.
Data processing requirements are increasing at an overwhelming rate. Now, delivering 800Gbps over distances of up to seven meters is becoming the table stakes. This capability becomes especially useful as we see computer architectures changing to support hundreds of GPUs, sometimes across multiple racks! That’s why Point2 Technology’s system is such a good fit with the future of high-performance computing.
Competitive Landscape
Point2 Technology certainly isn’t the only organization hoping to make waves with a new approach to data transmission. Don Barnetson, senior vice president and head of product at Credo, wants you to understand how cutthroat this market is. He thinks the progress Point2 Technology has made would provide it a noticeable competitive advantage to the existing optical technologies. That promise of much greater benefits compared to old approaches has attracted a lot of interest from industry and other stakeholders.
Founder and CEO Dave Welch, of AttoTude, has some even more exciting news! Using AttoTude’s waveguide technology, he sees the potential to increase distances by 10 meters, maybe even 20. Both Point2 Technology and AttoTude support a compromise solution that can meet halfway between copper and photonics. Second, they are introducing new, creative methodologies for collecting and using new kinds of data.
The urgency for such innovations stems partly from Nvidia’s plans to dramatically increase the maximum number of GPUs per system from 72 to 576 by 2027. This transition underscores an emerging, pressing challenge. As we look toward increasingly powerful computing architectures, we will need innovative solutions to ensure we have the bandwidth to support them.
