Overview
- AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI formed the Optical Compute Interconnect MSA and released the initial specification at oci-msa.org.
- OCI’s roadmap defines GEN1 4λ × 50Gbps NRZ (200Gbps per direction) and GEN2 400Gbps-per-direction BiDi, reaching up to 800Gbps per fiber with a path toward about 3.2Tbps per fiber.
- The specification supports pluggable modules, on-board optics and co-packaged optics, targeting lower power, low latency and cost efficiency versus copper.
- The consortium is structured as a hyperscaler-led MSA to accelerate multi-vendor interoperability and reduce integration risk compared with traditional standards bodies.
- A common optical physical layer is intended to carry different interconnect protocols, such as NVLink and UALink, over the same fiber infrastructure to overcome copper reach and bandwidth limits.