• Modules aren’t dead: they’re just morphing. Open CPX and the XPO MSA outlined technologies for scale-out, scale-up, CPO, NPO, and pluggables through 12.8T and beyond.
• The first Multicore Fiber specifications come soon and have room to grow.
• Marvell and others meanwhile, discussed ways optical into systems.

Corning enumerated the benefits of Multicore Fiber, which combines four optical cores into the same 125-micron fiber that holds only one today: 70% less cable mass in networks, 75% fewer connections, up to 60% less installation time, and greater reliability. The first specification from the MCF MSA, for O-band connections (<2km), comes soon.

Why four fibers? One must start somewhere. The upper limit is likely close to 19 cores, said Corning’s Gabe Sudduth.

Resolight aims for optical immortality with a platform that combines an optical switch with CPO which co-founder Ofer Shapiro claims can reduce network power by 40x. In 2025, networking accounted for around 10% of power in a scale-up rack. That rises to 50% in 256-576 XPU configurations and 80% in 1,000-2,000 XPU systems. Reducing optical power is also expensive, costing $1 billion to reduce power by 1 picojoule/bit, Shapiro claimed.

Lower power and cost also enable complex scale-up systems to better fit into the confines of edge data centers and reduce the distance to consumers. The technology, however, remains in development.

Marvell discussed how its Photonic Fabric (acquired from Celestial AI) will enable XPUs to share 72GB of HBM or 1-2TB of system DRAM making it a potential successor to CXL. Interesting note: 1 meter of fiber cam add 5ns of latency. The sweet spot for this technology is 30 meters and below.

XPO MSA, meanwhile, described advances in its supersize module with 12.8Tbps of bandwidth largely for scale-out. Like Open CPX, the XPO MSA plans to come to market by aligning with the existing module ecosystem.

Arista, the primary proponent of the technology, said XPO is compatible with LPO, but admitted that 200G/lane LPO remains a work in progress. Eoptolink, among others, is developing XPO modules containing multiple DSPs and optical engines.

Open CPX, which is developing open standards for CPO and NPO modules, showcased a prototype combining a 100T Arista switch with a detachable 6.4T Terahop optical engine for CPO, an unusual CPO showing for Arista, often a critic of CPO. 80+ members have joined Open CPX. The organization is already studying 12.8T optical engines (achieved through more lanes or 400G technology).

Terahop’s Ryan Yu also outlined the development of CPX-IAC, an intermediate connectivity scheme between NPO and CPO.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory described Omnistat, a telemetry system for high-bandwidth, large data sets like climate models or nuclear simulations. Today, telemetry data in these systems is viewed retrospectively. Omnistat streams data at terabits per second on a separate network, thereby allowing simultaneous monitoring.

Cloudflare, meanwhile, noted that 58.6% of the traffic it manages for clients now comes from robots versus 41.4% from humans. Just so you know.

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