Over the past two decades, the semiconductor industry has successfully pushed the limits to deliver more raw compute. A wild success, really. A 2025 Nvidia B200 GPU has 178,000 times more Floating Point Operations Per Second, or FLOPs than a top-of-the-line Intel CPU in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, we don't fully benefit thanks to limits - or "walls", so to say - that keep us from taking full advantage of all that new raw power. One such wall is the memory wall - where semiconductor memories like DRAM have not scaled as fast as the compute has. I have covered this before. But in recent years, another bottleneck has presented itself: One relating to IO bandwidth. In response, the industry has been working on a silicon photonic solution. In today’s video, we talk about a technology trend that has been over a decade in the making: Co-packaged optics.
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