Optimizing AI data center power efficiencies
AI-optimized data center networks offer significantly higher bandwidth —100 to 1000 times more than a Traditional workloads, but this increase comes with substantial power demands.
To address these demands, the focus is on reducing overall system power consumption, particularly by decreasing optics power consumption, which can account for approximately 50% of the total power used in AI networking.
Cisco integrated designs for linear optics leverage sophisticated Cisco Silicon Photonics technology with Cisco Silicon One SerDes (serializer/deserializer) to deliver highly reliable and high integrity signal transmission while reducing power consumption for energy efficient AI clusters.
Traditional retimed optics
In a traditional retimed 800 Gbps optical module used in a 51.2 T switch there are two main transmission components:
- The optical front end is responsible for converting electrical signals to and from optical signals, enabling efficient data transmission over fiber.
- The DSP-based retimer enhances signal quality by retiming the electrical signals as they travel to and from the fiber.
Together, these components contribute to significant system power consumption, with 64x optics accounting for approximately 1000W of system power in such a high-capacity switch.
Linear pluggable optics (LPO)
With Cisco LPO integrated designs, the Cisco Silicon One ASIC optimizes the signal integrity for transmission without a retimer in the optical module. The LPO module is focused on the optical front-end, and consumes 50% less power.
Converting all 64 optics saves approximately 500W of system power for a 51.2T switch, significantly lowering power consumption up to 30%.