[MUSIC] It's my pleasure to introduce Chris Cole.
Chris is advisor of
Parallax group and is currently advising
several companies including 26 and
Quintessence on advanced optical interfaces.
Before Parallax, Chris was VP of
advanced development at
finished Finisar Corporation where he led
the definition and delivered
older generation of 10 through
400 gigabit per second optical interfaces
for Datacom and Telecom applications.
Chris has delivered multiple generations
of optical transceivers
leading to billions of dollars of NSR revenue.
The 40, 100, 200,
400 gig interface he defined and proposed
for IEEE standardization constitute
the majority of optical data common links and
data centers and account for
billions of optics industry revenue.
Chris received his BS in Aeronautics and Astronautics and
his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is an IEEE and optical fellow.
Chris, thanks very much,
your talk is titled data center energy
savings in this decade up to you.
What I'm going to do is
just review where we are
today and take a look at backwards.
Then fairly mechanistically predict
what will happen in this decade.
I've done this a number of times
before at conferences and IEEE,
but I have the latest data,
which reinforces this formula.
I'll make a couple observations
and make some suggestions were
the real winds are in terms of
energy use for the data center in this decade.
This just reviews the history of optics
from 10G to where we are today at 400G.
We've had five generations of
technology starting at 10 gig per wavelength,
25, 50 100s, for generations.
We're all familiar with these.
These are the major codes.
LR, CWDM4.
We're now shipping FR4, DR4,
400G, which gets split out and same thing for 200G.
We can come back to this if there's specific questions,
but I think this is all familiar stuff.
Let me move on to the data.
This is how I like to slice.
This is from LightCounting,
which great organization for collecting data.
This is their latest report that I got.
They published this in December.
The actual data they have is up through last summer.
I have an annual volume here which is
second half of 20 and first half of 21.
I presented something similar at
the IEEE about a year ago.
It was data through the end of 20.
This is more recent data.
But what we see is the highest volume.
Let me just explain the axes.
On the x-axis, what we have is gigabit ethernet rate.
This is the rate on the link,
the gray or the serial links which carry that rate.
The red are WDM or PSM links that carry that rate.
I would argue that this is the way that our customers,
meaning the network engineers look at.
We get very excited about how many links we have
in a box or in a modular, a tile.
But all the network guys really care about is
they draw a line from one place to another.
They care about what's the rate on that line,
and they really don't care about much else.
This is the end customer perspective.
What we see as the greatest number of links that's still
shipping and it's actually modestly growing is 10G,
that's 10 million links.
This is all ethernet by the way.
The next highest is 100G,
it's nearly 6 million.
In fact it's 10 million if you add the 3,000,
100G serial links that are shipping.
The thing that's really shipping in
volume is 10 and 100G.
The 40G have been flat at about 1 million for
quite a while and it's actually slightly decreasing.
But the thing that's really coming up fast is the 200G.
Here it's almost a million for that period of time.
It's going to be over a million for 2021.
I'm pretty confident when that comes out.
That's the one that's growing fast.
The other one that's growing fast is 400G,
although it's really still at very small numbers.
There's hardly any 400G link deployment.
Let's see what else is interesting here.
50G serial, almost no volume.
25G serial, interesting volume of 2 million.
All kinds of interesting conclusions there.
Anyway, this is hard data
and then all of us can take turns putting a spin on it.
I've done is I've taken data like that.
What I've said is that the anchor point for
the industry is the IEEE 802.3.
That's where everybody gets together
and that's where things get standardized.
I came up with a formula based on what
happened at 10, 40,100 gig.
Or actually even going back to one gig in terms of
predicting how optics will grow in the future.
I'm not going to go through this in detail again.
I've done this before and if there's specific questions,
we can certainly go back to this.
But this is 200G and 400G SMF predictions.
The formula for the first million,
which is really the important shipment,
is that it's four years for a minor rate,
after the standard is adopted.
It's six years for the major rate,
meaning involving a new technology.
This is a prediction that could
have been made four years ago.
I've been doing that.
The 2021 prediction is looking very solid.
It is going to come true.
That's pretty solid. If you,
again, continued to extrapolate the 400 gig rate.
It looks like hit 1 million in 2023.
These predictions, which had been sitting around
for quite a while are actually quite solid.
Then if you go back to 10 and 40, and 100G,
what you find is you get it almost exactly the same.
With each generation we tell ourselves it's going to be
different this time because now we have texts,
now we're sending pictures around,
we're sending video around.
It's going to change things around.
But the thing we forget is human beings don't change.
Innovation pretty much happens at a constant rate.
This is actually a pretty good predictor.
Here I'm starting to get into a crystal ball,
but this is my prediction of
future high-volume Ethernet optics.
Again, these are the high-volume optics.
There is nothing else that hits these volumes.
Just to go back here.
Here, this is the 12.8 switch node which has shipping
today either in
a 64 or 128 radix configuration primarily.
People are either using
existing 100G or single wavelength 100G,
for 64 radix it's 200.
Then again, very low volume here because 32 radix,
I guess it's not terribly useful.
This is up links or something.
If we now start to predict the future,
we have 25.6 and 51 T switches.
We're going to see one more bump in the IO density.
I'm not going to differentiate with how
that's going to play out.
But I think we're going to see the same thing.
We're going to see very high volume of 200 GFR4 in
a QSFP56 supporting 25.6.
We're also going to see very high volume and
200G single wavelength at some point supporting.
These are both radix 128.
We're also going to see a high volume of 64 radix,
which is going to be a 400G.
Then again 800G,
which we're looking at standardizing
now whether that's FR8 or
FR4 is going to see
very modest volume because at a radix of 32.
I'm being told that's not very interesting.
That's fully supported with
existing OSFP and QSFP technology.
Then for the 51.2T node,
again, we're going to see very similar 64 and 128 radix.
That's fully supported in an OSFP-XD with
100 GIO which is going to support the two or three years
where we have this node with
100 GIO and then OSFP with 200
GIO is going to support the 256 by 200.
For these two switch nodes
were fully covered with existing technology.
This is well proven.
People are very conservative,
if you can do it how you've been doing it,
very unlikely to change.
I'm going to turn the crank again.
Remember what we did last time as we
predicted, 200 and 400.
Now I'm going to predict
800 and 1600 as well as 200 single wavelength.
What we see is for 200G single wavelength,
we're probably hit first million in
2028 for 800G we'll hit the first million in 2029,
1.6 Tara won't hit
first million until at least a decade from now.
Let's take a look now at energy use.
What I've put here are the high-volume transceivers,
the mainstream transceivers at
all the major technology points.
I put GBIC here because you'll see I needed
a reference point to do a Delta.
We have a one gig, 10 gig,
25, 50 and 100 gig per wavelength technology.
Again, very familiar modules, QSFP and OSFP.
The column I have here is watts at one million shipments.
Some of these things like 100G
and 10G when they started out, I mean,
these were over 20 watt modules,
but they went through six,
seven generations of reduction.
The 200 and 400,
they've actually started out at lower rates.
But these are numbers,
obviously here we're predicting what's going to happen.
Again, these are rough numbers
[NOISE] if somebody wants to come up says,
hey, we've got a four watt module [NOISE] Great.
I'm not going to argue with that.
These are just numbers I pulled off by
surveying a few parts that I could get info on.
What we see is 100G is at about three watts,
200G is somewhat lower,
I'm showing it at 5 watts.
I've seen numbers four-and-a-half.
The 400G or DR4 started out 12-14 watts.
I think people are saying eight watts now for
the second-generation stuff that's shipping in volume.
If we convert that to picojoules per bit,
what we see is some drastic reduction,
but then a real plateauing.
What I did here at the last line, is I said,
percentage Delta versus prior rate.
I just divided this column by
this column to get the percentage.
This is 5 times 100.
What we see is that at the tangy node,
we had a dramatic reduction
in energy efficiency versus one gig.
Same thing for 100 gig,
again, dramatic reduction versus
tangy and that was not by accident,
the industry really focused in making huge investments in
those technologies to really
drive the energy and cost down as well.
We're discussing energy here,
but that investment paid off in two ways.
But if we looked at 50 and 100G technology,
what we see is there's very little in terms
of energy use reduction compared to the prior rates.
I mean, we really are dramatically plateauing,
so 100G was about 30 picojoules
per bit and we're looking at
20 picojoules per bit
for these 100G per wavelength technology.
Now, comes the fun part,
because [LAUGHTER] we can
all give our own insights into why this is,
but I'll give you mine.
Let's start out with observations.
The high-volume optics that we'll
use this decade are 10,
25, 50, and 100.
Two hundred gig per wavelength optics will
not see volume until the end of the decade.
It doesn't mean we're not going to see
low volumes like we've
[NOISE] seen with all the other things.
But in terms of significant volume,
you saw that predictions 20,
28, 29, 31.
Pluggable modules QSFP and OSFP variance
will fully support all the switches
that are of interest,
all through 51T and
pluggable modules will be the high-volume form factor.
There may be some niche deployment of other approaches,
but this is going to be the bread and butter.
What is true is that investment in
50G per wavelength optics has been
limited and that was deliberate
to focus on 100G per second optics.
But what's interesting about that is this is
the first wavelength technology generation
that deliberately has seen an underinvestment.
I've not been in optics my whole career,
but I've seen it at least
since gig and I've never quite seen this.
This is very unusual.
The interesting result is
that 100G is certainly a stretch
but neither 50 or 100 has seen
significant energy decrease unlike before.
Now [NOISE] everybody can come up with their reasons,
but I'm going to put this down on
the bullet point and maybe it will
lead to an interesting discussion.
Which leads me to,
if we're really serious
about saving energy in this decade,
not in the next decade, but this decade,
we should restore investment in
50 gigabits per second wavelengths.
The train has somewhat left the station so we're going to
have to live with the decisions we
made five or six years ago.
But there's still major opportunities.
The end-users can certainly go to the AC guys and say,
we want you to migrate
your Phis into five nanometers or three nanometer,
I mean, right there we're talking about
just huge amount of
energy savings by simple things like that.
But somebody is going to have to pay for it.
Frankly, I don't think it will happen,
which leads me to believe that
energy use is actually not that important.
Because if you have a clear situation where someone
can take dollars and save
a ton of energy and it's not done,
it says we're just talking about it.
Now, I think the real opportunity lies in
concentrating investment in 100 gig per wavelength.
Let's recognize what happened
in the last five, six years.
We've been after 100G now for
many years and so let's really get a payoff for
this focus on 100G and not
repeat the 50G mistake and now jump to 200G.
We'll have this conversation again in six years and say,
why isn't our energy going down?
I'll just take this presentation
and double every number in here and say,
well, that's why.
I think if we're really serious about energy use,
these are the concrete steps that can be
taken that will actually make a difference.
[NOISE] Thank you.
[MUSIC]