Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
Zaranthos Wonder how shielding (or lack thereof) and external interference affect this? An optical cable would likely be far less subject to external interference apart from cable damage. Reply
Jame5 The title of the article says TB/s and then the body of the article says Tb/s. Which is it actually? There is an 8x difference there. Reply
bit_user Zaranthos said: Wonder how shielding (or lack thereof) and external interference affect this? Given that Point2 bundles 8 waveguides within a single cable, it seems that the issue of cross-talk and interference is negligible. At least, for the distances concerned. Jame5 said: The title of the article says TB/s and then the body of the article says Tb/s. Which is it actually? Yeah, someone deserves a slap on the wrist for that. It's Terrabits/s, according to the PDF (linked from the article). That's actually the second generation, based on 224G serdes and 130/260 GHz carrier frequency. Here's the PDF (from more than a year ago, apparently): https://point2tech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/240710-E-Tube-Whitepaper-clean-update-final.pdf Reply
cia1413 Zaranthos said: Wonder how shielding (or lack thereof) and external interference affect this? An optical cable would likely be far less subject to external interference apart from cable damage. A wave guide is a solid hollow tube, so it is shielded, the signal bounces back and forth on the sides but the tube is grounded. The frequency makes it so the signal cant survive outside the tube so you cant really have cross talk. I used waveguides in the military so I might be wrong, but I have a little bit of experience using them in microwave and satcom gear. Reply
bill001g cia1413 said: A wave guide is a solid hollow tube, so it is shielded, the signal bounces back and forth on the sides but the tube is grounded. The frequency makes it so the signal cant survive outside the tube so you cant really have cross talk. I used waveguides in the military so I might be wrong, but I have a little bit of experience using them in microwave and satcom gear. That is how older cell towers used to work. Those huge cable going up the side of the tower were not cables they were hollow wave guide. Modern technology has allowed them to place even very high power radios in the antenna themselves rather than at the bottom of the tower. Reply
bit_user bill001g said: That is how older cell towers used to work. Those huge cable going up the side of the tower were not cables they were hollow wave guide. I've seen one of those, up close. I worked with a guy who had a short piece of one in his office. He said it was from a FM radio tower. The explanation I got was that high frequency signals stayed mostly at the surface of a wire and therefore you could economize by not using a solid cable and simply use a hollow one. Nothing about waveguides though. So, either he was wrong about how it worked, or it operated on a different principle than these do. Reply
usertests Consumes 1/3 the power of optical, but costs 1/3 more than optical Point2 says the design consumes roughly one-third the power of optical links, costs about one-third as much Huh? Reply
bit_user usertests said: Huh? I don't know where the first quote is from, but the Point2 PDF says that active optical cable (AOC/LPO – they don't spell out what LPO means) costs 3x as much as e-Tube cable . The article also cites a piece in IEEE spectrum. So, maybe the first quote is in reference to something it says? Perhaps the discrepancy could be explained by looking at cost overheads (i.e. transceivers, connectors, etc). Reply
MoxNix Zaranthos said: Wonder how shielding (or lack thereof) and external interference affect this? An optical cable would likely be far less subject to external interference apart from cable damage. Waveguides are inherently shielded by design. They are hollow tubes, the signal bounces around inside the tube, the tube walls are the shielding. Reply
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Reference reading
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/start-up-proposes-scaled-up-ai-data-center-active-radio-cable-connectivity-radio-based-interconnections-operating-at-millimeter-wave-and-terahertz-frequencies-offer-1-6-tb-s-using-half-the-volume-of-copper#main
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