AI applications and ML workloads account for nearly 20% of data center electricity consumption today, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and data centers are projected to represent up to 9.1% of total U.S. electricity generation annually by 2030.
Data center operators are looking for ways to boost power efficiency and sustainability, and Point2 Technology is making a case for cutting data center power bills by changing the networking cables.
Point2 doesn’t make the cabling, but it makes SoCs that are used in network cabling, says David Kuo, associate vice president of product marketing and business development at Point2 Technology. In high-bandwidth situations, these ultra-low-power, low-latency, mixed-signal SOCs are needed.
“The reason that the chips are being added into these Internet cables is the fact that as data speeds continue to increase in copper wiring, there’s something called the high frequency loss. What that really means, from a physics perspective, is that the higher data rate you go, the signal being sent through the copper wires will incur higher loss,” he said.
To maintain signal integrity, cables use something called retimers so impairments to a signal can be cleaned up and recovered, so that you can communicate from one rack to another rack, between a switch and a GPU or CPU server.
Point2’s P1B121 Smart Retimer SoC integrates eight-unidirectional SerDes channels with smart Clock Data Recovery (CDR)/Retimer functions that support 112G PAM4 and 56G NRZ data rates. Its signal processing capabilities include programmable equalization, a serializer with a programmable FIR filter, and a deserializer with advanced equalizers for optimized performance across varying cable conditions.
The P1B121 is suitable for a range of data center configurations, including in-rack and adjacent rack setups such as top-of-rack switch-to-server connectivity, rack-to-rack connectivity, and accelerator-to-accelerator compute fabric connectivity.
The 112G PAM4 Smart Retimer requires only 3.0W of power consumption per chip, so 6 W total for each cable. That’s half of the 25 W of traditional networking cables. It reduces cable power and cooling demands while achieving an impressive chip latency of 3ns, which is 20 times lower than DSP-based PAM4 Retimers currently available.
That can add up, Kuo notes, as a rack can have anywhere from 30 to 150 cables in it. Now multiply each cable by 12 W instead of 25 W and you’ve got a significant savings.
There is also savings on weight. To compensate for signal loss, some cable makers simply use more copper, making cabling thicker. Having retimer chips allows you to extend the cable link without having to go to a thicker gauge copper wiring.
The Point2 retimer supports the current speeds of 400 Gb/s as well as the upcoming 800 Gb products coming to market and the 1.6 Tb in the coming years, said Kuo. Point2 customers are designing cables now and will be delivering them in the first half of 2025, he added.
Source:: Network World