Posts Tagged 'networking for AI training workloads'
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January 12, 2026
Active Copper Cables: A New Class of Rack Interconnects for Further Optimizing AI
By Nicola Bramante, Senior Principal Engineer, Connectivity Marketing, Marvell
The exponential growth in AI workloads drives new requirements for connectivity in terms of data rate, associated bandwidth and distance, especially for scale-up applications. With direct attach copper (DAC) cables reaching their limits in terms of bandwidth and distance, a new class of cables, active copper cables (ACCs), are coming to market for short-reach links within a data center rack and between racks. Designed for connections up to 2 to 2.5 meters long, ACCs can transmit signals further than traditional passive DAC cables in the 200G/lane fabrics hyperscalers will soon deploy in their rack infrastructures.
At the same time, a 1.6T ACC consumes a relatively miniscule 2.5 watts of power and can be built around fewer and less sophisticated components than longer active electrical cables (AECs) or active optical cables (AOCs). The combination of features gives ACCs a peak mix of bandwidth, power, and cost for server-to-server or server-to-switch connections within the same rack.
Marvell announced its first ACC linear equalizers for producing ACC cables last month.
Inside the Cable
ACCs effectively integrate technology originally developed for the optical realm into copper cables. The idea is to use optical technologies to extend bandwidth, distance and performance while taking advantage of copper’s economics and reliability. Where these ACCs differ is in the components added to them and the way they leverage the technological capabilities of a switch or other device to which they are connected.
ACCs include an equalizer that boosts signals received from the opposite end of the connection. As analog devices, ACC equalizers are relatively inexpensive compared to digital alternatives, consume minimal power and add very little latency.
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October 14, 2025
AI Scale Up Goes for Distance with 9-meter 800G AEC from Infraeo and Marvell
By Winnie Wu, Senior Director Product Marketing at Marvell
Welcome to the beginning of row-scale computing.
At the 2025 OCP Global Summit, Marvell and Infraeo will showcase a breakthrough in high-speed interconnect technology — a 9-meter active electrical cable (AEC) capable of transmitting 800G across standard copper. The demonstration will take place in the Marvell booth #B1.
This latest innovation brings data center architecture one step closer to full row-scale AI system design, allowing copper connections that stretch across seven racks - that’s nearly the length of a standard 10-rack row. It builds on the prior achievement by Marvell of a 7-meter AEC demonstrated at OFC 2025, pushing high-speed copper technology even further beyond what was thought possible.
Pushing the Boundaries of Copper
Until now, copper connections in large-scale AI systems have been limited by reach. Traditional electrical cables lose signal quality as distance increases, restricting system architects to a few meters between servers or racks. The 9-meter AEC changes that equation.
By combining high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) with advanced noise reduction and signal integrity engineering, the new design extends copper’s effective range well beyond conventional limits, maintaining clean, low-latency data transfer over distances once thought achievable only with optical fiber.
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October 07, 2025
Faster, Farther and Going Optical: How PCIe Is Accelerating the AI Revolution
By Annie Liao, Product Management Director, ODSP Marketing, Marvell
For over 20 years, PCIe, or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, has been the dominant standard to connect processors, NICs, drives and other components within servers thanks to the low latency and high bandwidth of the protocol as well as the growing expertise around PCIe across the technology ecosystem. It will also play a leading role in defining the next generation of computing systems for AI through increases in performance and combining PCIe with optics.
Here’s why:
PCIe Transitions Are Accelerating
Seven years passed between the debut of PCIe Gen 3 (8 gigatransfers/second—GT/s) in 2010 and the release of PCIe Gen 4 (16 GT/sec) in 2017.1 Commercial adoption, meanwhile, took closer to a full decade2
Toward a terabit (per second): PCIe standards are being developed and adopted at a faster rate to keep up with the chip-to-chip interconnect speeds needed by system designers.
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February 14, 2023
The Three Things Next-Generation Data Centers Need from Networking
By Amit Sanyal, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Marvell
Data centers are arguably the most important buildings in the world. Virtually everything we do—from ordinary business transactions to keeping in touch with relatives and friends—is accomplished, or at least assisted, by racks of equipment in large, low-slung facilities.
And whether they know it or not, your family and friends are causing data center operators to spend more money. But it’s for a good cause: it allows your family and friends (and you) to continue their voracious consumption, purchasing and sharing of every kind of content—via the cloud.
Of course, it’s not only the personal habits of your family and friends that are causing operators to spend. The enterprise is equally responsible. They’re collecting data like never before, storing it in data lakes and applying analytics and machine learning tools—both to improve user experience, via recommendations, for example, and to process and analyze that data for economic gain. This is on top of the relentless, expanding adoption of cloud services.
