NB596: Cisco, NVIDIA Plug New Optical Form Factor; TSMC Etches Another Record Quarter

Drew Conry-Murray (0:00)

Take a network break, I'm Drew Connery-Murray.

Johna Johnson (0:02)

I'm Johna Johnson. Let's tuck into a stack of virtual pancakes, because it's getting cold out there, to prepare for this week's tech news. We've got a red alert from Nutanix, Quantum Computing from ORCA in London, a new quantum lab in New York City, which by the way, if you were attending the Neymurty's Next Conference, you would be doing a field trip to that lab on Tuesday the 20th.

Drew Conry-Murray (0:22)

Oh, nice.

Johna Johnson (0:23)

Yeah, a V6 announcement from AWS, a lot of buying and selling from Nokia, Proofpoint and Veronis, quarterly results from Ericsson and TSMC, Space News and more.

Drew Conry-Murray (0:34)

But first, a word from our sponsor, iTential.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

Sponsor iTential's Flow AI delivers agentic operations for infrastructure, meaning easily build AI agents that actually work the way engineers need them to, governed, terministic, and built for production. Add intelligent automations to your network operations without the usual AI chaos. Find out more at itential.com/flowai.

That is itential.com/flowai.

Drew Conry-Murray (1:03)

We thank iTential for being a sponsor and do stick around. After the news, we've got a sponsored TechBytes podcast where I talk to Meter about a new program they're launching called Meter Grants. Meter Grants offers up to $2,000 in grants for early career network engineers who are looking to get certified or advance their learning. We'll talk about how the program works, who's eligible to apply, and why Meter is giving away money in the first place.

All right, John, let's dive into the Red Alert.

Johna Johnson (1:26)

Sure.

In the past week, 5,309 new CVEs were created and a whopping 12,587 were updated. 481 of the new CVEs are critical with a CVSS score of nine or higher, with 32 getting that perfect 10 out of 10 The Red Alert this week goes to CVE 2026, 84, 731 for Nutanix Prism Gateway. It describes a vulnerability in Nutanix Prism Element that allows an unauthenticated remote hacker, remote attacker to bypass authentication and gain full access to administrative API endpoints by a crafted HTTP header. We know attackers can execute root-level commands on all controller VMs and unauthorized access to VM memory and virtual disks. Oopsie.

Drew Conry-Murray (2:13)

Yeah.

All right. Links in the show notes if you want to go get a patch in. Let's dive into the news. On October 12th, Cisco and Nvidia introduced a ultra-dense, small form, factable, pluggable, or USFP. This is a pluggable optical form factor to enhance network scalability and efficiency for AI data centers. The new USFP will support 16 lanes for traffic at 400 gig per lane, and it's designed to eventually scale up to 32 lanes, enabling up to 12.8 terabits of pluggable capacity for Ethernet fabrics. They're going to provide a path supporting both 200 and 400 gig SerDes-based systems and ASICs. They also say the system will be able to drive up to 1.3x greater power efficiency.

Johna Johnson (2:55)

Wow.

Faster, denser, and lower power. That's the new faster, better, cheaper, right?

Drew Conry-Murray (3:02)

Absolutely. Yeah. Particularly in this market where every watt of that power matters.

Cisco and Nvidia are partnering with a company called TE Connectivity and another one called Amphenol to build USFP cages, connectors, and modules, and they expect additional partners to join. In the stuff I read, I didn't see any actual date on when this would actually be available, so it seems to be a work in progress. Nvidia and Cisco are also planning on trying to develop an community-led multi-source USFP project.

Johna Johnson (3:33)

Makes a lot of sense.

Drew Conry-Murray (3:35)

Yeah, AI driving everything faster, further.

Johna Johnson (3:38)

Exactly.

Well, if it's not about AI, it must be quantum. ORCA Computing, pursuing a strategy of enabling quantum-accelerated AI for science apps, applications that is, not phone apps, launched access to one of its PT-3 photonic quantum computers on October 15th. The system is live in the Digital Realty Innovation Lab drill in London, where it runs alongside Nvidia accelerated computing. So, quantum plus AI. The PT-3 has already allowed ORCA to generate results from a hybrid quantum classical extension of Nvidia's protein generative model for protein design. The model was trained on 32 Nvidia hopper GPUs, working with the PT-3 using 64 photons in 128 Q-modes, and netted a 20 percent improvement in generation of useful protein structures.

I think the main news here drew in a nutshell is, as we've said for a long time, AI and quantum solve diametrically different problems and work very, very well together and the future doesn't belong to AI or quantum, it belongs to both.

Drew Conry-Murray (4:45)

Yeah, that's right.