Intel's 4 TB/s Integrated Optical I/O Chiplet Called 'Important Milestone'
insideHPC, Wednesday, June 26th, 2024
Intel announced it has achieved an advance in integrated photonics technology for high-speed data transmission. At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference 2024, Intel said its Integrated Photonics Solutions (IPS) Group demonstrated an integrated optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet co-packaged with an Intel CPU and running live data.
The prototype OCI chiplet is designed to support 64 channels of 32 gigabits per second (Gbps) data transmission in each direction on up to 100 meters of fiber optics and is expected to address AI infrastructure's demands for higher bandwidth, lower power consumption and longer reach. It enables future scalability of CPU/GPU cluster connectivity and novel compute architectures, including coherent memory expansion and resource disaggregation.
The fully Integrated OCI chiplet leverages Intel's silicon photonics technology and integrates a silicon photonics integrated circuit (PIC), which includes on-chip lasers and optical amplifiers, with an electrical IC. The OCI chiplet demonstrated at OFC was co-packaged with an Intel CPU but can also be integrated with next-generation CPUs, GPUs, IPUs and other system-on-chips (SoCs), according to the company, Intel said.