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I recently had my view on fiber optics completely rewritten, & it's also made a huge difference for me practically, around the house. Turns out there have been some works-fine, moderately-priced fiber-optic cables for DisplayPort for a while now. A DisplayPort 32Gbps cable can be gotten for <$50, and unlike copper, the length doesn't really affect the price that much: fiber is bloody cheap. And so pleasantly light weight to deal with! I've used this for sitting on my porch & doing gaming. I probably have enough usb2 cable to make it up the roof but haven't tried it yet. But I could very much see something like what Rockport is doing being based on this tech. As opposed to trying to stuff some 400Gbps ultra-powerful nics into a box, & run them to a switch, it makes all the sense in the world to have an array of cheaper-to-make, cheap-fiber, cheap-xmitter 25Gbps connections coming out of a box, and to esckew central switching entirely. They might potentially even use the same low-cost xmitters my cheap cables use! I'm pretty stunned by the effort here- if I read this right they're doing 12 ports per box, which is a very high radix connectivity. That could allow some truly fascinating topologies to be created. I'm kind of under the impression that these fiber optic hubs create a pretty narrow set of topologies, that this is kind of following a top-of-rack-ish model, but I haven't investigated much to understand deeply what Rockport is offering. But I've been thinking about these cheap cables, wanting to see more consumerization, more fiber optics, and this definitely seems like a potentially very interesting disruption from below. |