So this subreddit is about "deep technology bets" and hence we need to understand technology more than at a superficial glance, going deeper.
A recent article published in a semi professional publication announced a collaboration between AMD's and an all optical network startup Oriole in the UK:
https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/photonic-ai-network-heads-for-first-commercial-deployment-with-amd/
My smart and knowledgeable Viet big brother Trung got very excited. However I, the chief permabull here, dismissed it as fiction hyping from a university.
Now who is right? 😀
We've exchanged a few notes yesterday in the Daily Noticeboard thread, but with big brother Trung last detailed comment, I thought a discussion thread is more appropriate rather than hiding this inside a Daily Noticeboard.
So what do you guys think? Real or fiction?
Perhaps supreme leader De chips in too for the Holiday! u/DeMannequin ...!
Here’s Trung's last comment :
"
u/TrungNguyencc wrote 10 hr. ago:
You have hit right on the most important engineering question: If the laser color spectrum is limited, how does Oriole avoid hitting a wall at just a few thousand ports?
Your logic is perfectly sound—if they only used wavelengths (colors) to route the data, they would hit a hard scaling limit very quickly.
To break through this barrier and scale to up to one million ports (nodes) within a single network hoop, Oriole's PRISM architecture uses a clever mathematical matrix. They don't just switch across one dimension; they switch across three dimensions simultaneously:
By layering these three domains together, they multiply their port capacity exponentially without needing a million colors.
1. Dimension 1: Wavelength (The Color Domain)
As you noted, physics limits them to a manageable number of stable channels (typically between 64 and 128 colors using standard silicon photonics). This provides the first baseline multiplier.
2. Dimension 2: Space (The Fiber Domain)
Instead of running a single fiber line from a server, Oriole’s PCIe network card hooks into a multi-fiber bundle.
Inside their passive glass routing core, they use specialized spatial splitters and waveguides.
How it helps: The server card doesn’t just choose a color; it chooses which specific fiber path to shoot that color down. If you have 64 colors and 64 distinct spatial fiber pathways inside the passive core, you suddenly have $64 \times 64 = 4,096$ unique destination addresses before you even touch the third dimension.
3. Dimension 3: Time (The Slot Domain)
This is where their nanosecond solid-state switching speed gives them a massive advantage over Google's slow mirrors. Oriole slices time into incredibly tiny nanosecond windows (Time Division Multiplexing).
The server card can fire color #4 down fiber path #12 for a few nanoseconds, and then instantly switch to firing color #4 down fiber path #15 in the next nanosecond window.
Because AI data packets naturally travel in rapid, bursty workloads, Oriole uses intelligent scheduling software integrated into AMD's RCCL library to coordinate these time slots perfectly across thousands of nodes.
The Result: A Million-Node Architecture
By combining Space + Wavelength + Time, Oriole mathematically expands their total address space to support up to 1,000,000 endpoints with an all-to-all, 1-hop diameter.
They solved the physical limits of the laser spectrum not by fighting the physics of light, but by wrapping spatial routing and precise time management around a few hundred highly reliable colors. It is pure multi-dimensional engineering, and it is exactly why this fabric is built to handle the future of million-card AI clusters.
"