Networking & Interconnect — Timeline

Dates are publication dates of the underlying source, not ingest dates. Vendor claims carry their availability state on that date: sampling, roadmap or shipping.

2026

September

• Sep 24 — [Ingest] NVIDIA's CPO blog (2025-08-18) read and compiled: the watts behind the 3.5x claim. Corrected the reading of the "63x" signal-integrity figure on this rung. (NVIDIA CPO blog)
• Sep 24 — [Compile] First compile of the rung: index, timeline and frontier written. The two co-packaged-optics sources ingested on Sep 11 are compiled. (Index)

August

• Aug 06 — [KB] The photonic-interconnect thesis, with a live position behind it, is rescued from the retired optical-computing topic and moved to this rung. (Theses)

March

• Mar 20 — [Paper] Nokia Bell Labs trains a small photonic neural network entirely on the chip (2 inputs, 8 hidden, 1 output; 92.5% on 2D classification). Photonic computing, out of scope. (On-chip backprop; Nokia Bell Labs)

January

• Jan 15 — [Paper] A rack-mounted photonic tensor processor on imec's iSiPP50G platform runs pretrained networks on a 9 × 3 optical crossbar without chip-specific retraining. Photonic computing, out of scope. (Photonic tensor processor)
• Jan 05 — [Technical report] NVIDIA describes the Vera Rubin platform, including the Spectrum-6 switch with co-packaged silicon photonics at 102.4 Tb/s. (NVIDIA Vera Rubin; Silicon Photonics)

2025

October

• Oct 08 — [Announcement] Broadcom announces Tomahawk 6 – Davisson (BCM78919): 102.4 Tb/s with co-packaged optics, 70% lower optical link power, "more than 3.5x lower" than pluggables. Sampling, not volume. (Broadcom)

August

• Aug 18 — [Technical blog] NVIDIA states the watts: pluggable optics "often 30W per interface", co-packaged "as low as 9W" (about 3.3x); electrical loss up to 22 dB against about 4 dB. Availability restated as early 2026 (Quantum-X InfiniBand) and the second half of 2026 (Spectrum-X Ethernet), later than March's dates. Vendor-stated, pre-shipping. (NVIDIA CPO blog)

March

• Mar 18 — [Announcement] NVIDIA announces Spectrum-X Photonics and Quantum-X Photonics at GTC 2025: 3.5x power efficiency and 4x fewer lasers against pluggable optics. Roadmap: InfiniBand later in 2025, Ethernet in 2026. (NVIDIA)