Scale-out networking doesn’t need CPO, slide argues; compute still dominates power use
zephyr_z9 · x · 2026-07-25
The chart argues that pluggables are good enough for scale-out, because the power saved by CPO is not worth the operational complexity.
Key point from the slide:
- Scale-up benefits more from power efficiency, because interconnect power is a larger share of the total system.
- In scale-out, most energy still goes to compute and other rack components.
- The slide also says scale-out uses about 1/10 the bandwidth of scale-up networks and far fewer links, so the networking power debate is often overemphasized.
- The lowest-power optical options for scale-up likely require co-packaging or other lower-power approaches.
The chart compares a hypothetical 72-GPU pod with different optical configurations and shows that optical power is only a small slice of total pod power in the scale-out case.
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