The power problem, Microsoft argues, starts with the cables themselves.
How MOSAIC works
Copper interconnects top out at roughly two meters at high data rates, limiting them to within a single rack. Laser-based fiber optic cables go further but consume more power and are sensitive to temperature and dust, Microsoft said in the post. MOSAIC reaches up to 50 meters while drawing less power than either, the company added.
“Imaging fiber looks like a standard fiber, but inside it has thousands of cores,” Paolo Costa, a Microsoft partner research manager and the project’s lead researcher, wrote in the post. “That was the missing piece. We finally had a way to carry thousands of parallel channels in one cable.”
MOSAIC is not Microsoft’s only optical networking bet, and it is not the one furthest along.
HCF is already in production across Azure regions
MOSAIC arrives alongside Hollow Core Fiber (HCF), a complementary technology Microsoft is already deploying globally. HCF carries optical signals through air rather than glass, delivering up to 47% faster data transmission and 33% lower latency than conventional single-mode fiber, according to published research from the University of Southampton cited by Microsoft.
Frank Rey, Microsoft’s general manager of Azure Hyperscale Networking, said in the post that the two technologies are complementary — HCF for long-distance inter-datacenter links, MOSAIC for in-facility GPU and server connectivity.
