Latest Marvell Blog Articles
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April 17, 2025
Advancing Optics with a Hybrid Route to TIAs
By Nicola Bramante, Senior Principal Engineer
Transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) are one of the unsung heroes of the cloud and AI era.
At the recent OFC 2025 event in San Francisco, exhibitors demonstrated the latest progress on 1.6T optical modules featuring Marvell 200G TIAs. Recognized by multiple hyperscalers for its superior performance, Marvell 200G TIAs are becoming a standard component in 200G/lane optical modules for 1.6T deployments.
TIAs capture incoming optical signals from light detectors and transform the underlying data to be transmitted between and used by servers and processors in data centers and scale-up and scale-out networks. Put another way, TIAs allow data to travel from photons to electrons. TIAs also amplify the signals for optical digital signal processors, which filter out noise and preserve signal integrity.
And they are pervasive. Virtually every data link inside a data center longer than three meters includes an optical module (and hence a TIA) at each end. TIAs are critical components of fully retimed optics (FRO), transmit retimed optics (TRO) and linear pluggable optics (LPO), enabling scale-up servers with hundreds of XPUs, active optical cables (AOC), and other emerging technologies, including co-packaged optics (CPO), where TIAs are integrated into optical engines that can sit on the same substrates where switch or XPU ASICs are mounted. TIAs are also essential for long-distance ZR/ZR+ interconnects, which have become the leading solution for connecting data centers and telecom infrastructure. Overall, TIAs are a must have component for any optical interconnect solution and the market for interconnects is expected to triple to $11.5 billion by 2030, according to LightCounting.
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March 24, 2025
In AI, The Voyage from Bigger to Better Is Underway
By Michael Kanellos, Head of Influencer Relations, Marvell
Bigger is better, right? Look at AI: the story swirls with superlatives.
ChatGPT landed one million users within five days,1 far surpassing the pace of any previous technology. The compute requirements of training notable AI models increases 4.5x per year while training data sets mushroom by 3x per year,2 etc.
Bigger, however, comes at a price. Data center power consumption threatens to nearly triple by 2028 primarily because of AI3. Water withdrawals, meanwhile, are escalating as well: by 2027, AI data centers could need up to 6.6 billion cubic meters, or about half of what the UK uses.4 The economic and environmental toll over the long run may not be sustainable.
Conceptually it is easier to understand how larger models translate into a "better and more capable" model. The more layers or parameters the models have, contribute to the quality and accuracy of the model. Yet, can we sustain that extracted value at the same cadence by continuing the size increase? Or will the curve start to plateau at some point?
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March 17, 2025
The evolution of AI interconnects
By Nick Kucharewski, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, Marvell
The rapid expansion in the size and capacity of AI workloads is significantly impacting both computing and network technologies in the modern data center. Data centers are continuously evolving to accommodate higher performance GPUs and AI accelerators (XPUs), increased memory capacities, and a push towards lower latency architectures for arranging these elements. The desire for larger clusters with shorter compute times has driven heightened focus on networking interconnects, with designers embracing state-of-the-art technologies to ensure efficient data movement and communication between the components comprising the AI cloud.
A large-scale AI cloud data center can contain hundreds of thousands, or millions, of individual links between the devices performing compute, switching, and storage functions. Inside the cloud, there is a tightly ordered fabric of high-speed interconnects: webs of copper wire and glass fiber each carrying digital signals at roughly 100 billion bits per second. Upon close inspection there is a pattern and a logical ordering to each link used for every connection in the cloud, which can be analyzed by considering the physical attributes of different types of links.
For inspiration, we can look back 80 years to the origins of modern computing, when John von Neumann posed the concept of memory hierarchy for computer architectures1. In 1945 Von Neumann proposed a smaller faster storage memory placed close to the compute circuitry, and a larger slower storage medium placed further away, to enable a system delivering both performance and scale. This concept of memory hierarchy is now pervasive, with the terms “Cache”, “DRAM”, and “Flash” part of our everyday language. In today’s AI cloud data centers, we can analyze the hierarchy of interconnects in much the same way. It is a layered structure of links, strategically utilized according to their innate physical attributes of speed, power consumption, reach, and cost.
The hierarchy of interconnects
This hierarchy of interconnects provides a framework for understanding emerging interconnect technologies and to assess their potential impact in the next generation of AI data centers. Through a discussion of the basic attributes of emerging interconnect technologies in the context of the goals and aims of the AI cloud design, we can estimate how these technologies may be deployed in the coming years. By identifying the desired attributes for each use case, and the key design constraints, we can also predict when new technologies will pass the "tipping point" enabling widespread adoption in future cloud deployments.
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February 27, 2025
Lightwave+BTR Innovation Reviews Ranks Marvell Products as Among the Industry’s Best
By Michael Kanellos, Head of Influencer Relations, Marvell
Marvell has once again been honored with a variety of Lightwave+BTR Innovation Reviews high scores. A panel of experts from the optical communications community recognized five products from Marvell’s portfolio as among the best in the industry.
“On behalf of the Lightwave+BTR Innovation Reviews, I would like to congratulate Marvell on again achieving a well-deserved honoree status for multiple products,” said Lightwave+BTR Editor-in-Chief Sean Buckley. “This is a very competitive program allowing us to showcase and applaud the most innovative products that significantly impact the industry. It says a lot that Marvell is consistently recognized by these experts for its innovation.”
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February 25, 2025
Marvell and IIT Hyderabad Partner to Support India’s Next Generation of Technology Innovators
By Michael Kanellos, Head of Influencer Relations, Marvell
Lighting the way! Marvell SVP Cary Ussery, CSE HOD at IIT Prof. Anthony, Marvell AVP Prasun Kapur, IITH Faculty Lead Dr. Praveen Tammana, and Marvell Director Abed Kamaluddin inaugurate a new chapter in the Marvell-IITH collaboration.
Did you know that India is estimated to have about 20% of the world’s chip design workforce? This design expertise continues to expand with strategic investments in workforce education and development.
To that end, Marvell and the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad) have launched the Marvell Data Acceleration and Offload Research Facility, focused on advancing network, storage, and security technologies to raise the performance of accelerated infrastructure.
An inaugural reception was held with more than 150 students, staff, and faculty members attending. The event unveiled the research facility and the OCTEON server cluster in the data center.
The Marvell research facility, the first of its kind globally, provides students, researchers, and industry professionals with access to cutting-edge Marvell data processor units (DPUs), switches, compute express link (CXL) processors, network interface controllers (NICs) and other technologies for accelerating how data is secured, moved, managed, and processed across AI clusters, clouds and networks. Industry research estimates that up to one-third of the time spent in AI/ML processing can be consumed by waiting for network access. A key element of the facility is access to Marvell comprehensive software solution frameworks optimized for developing solutions that take advantage of packet processing, cryptography, and AI/ML accelerators integrated in Marvell silicon.
最近推文
- Advancing Optics with a Hybrid Route to TIAs
- In AI, The Voyage from Bigger to Better Is Underway
- The evolution of AI interconnects
- Lightwave+BTR Innovation Reviews Ranks Marvell Products as Among the Industry’s Best
- Marvell and IIT Hyderabad Partner to Support India’s Next Generation of Technology Innovators
