- Oriole Networks landed its first commercial deployment, teaming with AMD to test its PRISM pure photonic networking system
- The startup says PRISM replaces electrical switches with an all-photonic architecture
- Oriole is entering a growing race to fix AI data center bottlenecks
Oriole has teamed up with AMD on the first commercial deployment of its fully photonic data center networking system, setting the stage for broader deployments next year, Oriole CEO James Regan told Fierce.
Photonics is a branch of optical networking. Both photonics and opticial networking use light through fiber to transmit data. But optical networking converts light to electricity at switching points, whereas photonics aims to improve performance and efficiency by keeping signals in the optical domain end-to-end.
Oriole’s PRISM is a fully photonic network system designed to provide port-level, all-to-all connectivity, eliminating the need for electrical switches and dramatically reducing the number of optical transceivers needed in the network. This evolution, Regan said, slashes power consumption, reduces latency, increases bandwidth and strengthens network resilience by eliminating single points of failure.
“There’s a big problem now with electrical switches, which are basically bottlenecking AI traffic, and it’s going to get worse,” Regan said. “What we do is we replace all the electrical switches.”
PRISM is chip-agnostic, and the collaboration with AMD utilizes both the chipmaker’s Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs to assess how the PRISM system might be used to scale inference workloads.
What is driving the need for photonics?
Inference performance is bound by latency – it can only perform as well as the slowest component’s latency will allow, Regan said. Today, Broadcom offers a Tomahawk Ultra switch with top-of-the-line latency of just 250 nanoseconds. “Our equivalent to that will be 10 nanoseconds,” Regan said. “So, more than order of magnitude level latency [improvement].”
Beyond its work with AMD, Regan said Oriole is “raising a ton of money right now” to scale the company and prepare for volume deployments. Oriole is in discussions with enterprises, as well as cloud providers (including hyperscalers) and a handful of “companies that own telephone networks and data centers," Regan said. “There’s a lot of stuff in the pipe,” Regan said, adding that additional deployments are expected next year.
The biggest hurdle Oriole faces along the way is overcoming the misconception that “there’s no alternative to optical switching.” He likened the optical-to-photonic transition to the evolution from horse-drawn carriages to cars.
There are plenty of efforts to improve the metaphorical optical horse and carriage with titanium horseshoes and streamlined saddles, “and then someone turns up with a motorcar…How could a carriage go without a horse? It’s just an insane idea [to them].”
Regan added that Oriole is competing against both Ethernet and legacy switching vendors.
Dell’Oro Group VP Sameh Boujelbene told Fierce that if its technology proves viable at scale, “Oriole is targeting a substantial opportunity, as
All aboard the photonics train
Indeed, Oriole isn’t the only one interested in photonics.
Ciena has recently talked up its RLS Hyper Rail photonics system, noting during Q2 earnings that an unnamed hyperscaler was behind the first order for that product. Regan, however, said this particular system still assumes the inclusion of electrical switches and isn’t part of a pure photonic network.
Others, including Google, Omnitron, Lumentum, Calient.AI and others are trying to solve the network bottleneck problem using MEMs-based implementations of optical circuit switching (OCS), which is an alternative to packet-based electrical switching.
Of OCS, Boujebene said the "approach becomes particularly attractive in AI clusters, where large volumes of predictable east-west traffic can overwhelm traditional networks and where every watt of power saved can be redirected toward GPUs. While optical circuit switching is not a new concept, few vendors have demonstrated commercial deployments at a time when AI infrastructure power constraints have become a critical concern."
For its part, Oriole has pitched its system as a novel approach designed to tackle some of the challenges that remain in OCS systems.
Meanwhile, the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) Global Forum – which counts Ciena, AMD, Cisco, Ericsson, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Nokia, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and mobile operators among its ranks – has been pushing for the evolution from electronics to photonics. Its goal of achieving an “all-photonic network,” or APN, seems to align most with the direction Oriole is headed.
“The APN is the next generation of the optical network that is more powerful, capable, and efficient,” the group noted in a whitepaper.
IOWN argued that historical impediments to all-photonic networks — including oversized optical transponders, constraints on transmission distance, difficulties with wavelength switching, and a lack of photonics network standards — have begun to fade. And the group touts benefits for photonics networking similar to those described by Oriole: lower latency and power consumption, greater bandwidth and improved network resilience.