Intel introduces first photonic I/O chiplet to deliver 4 Tbps bi-directional transfer rate over up to 100 meters

Manufacturers are focusing on offering more and more better and faster solutions to address the large amount of data that demands Artificial Intelligence. As a solution to this problem, Intel has presented he first fully integrated photonic I/O chipletwhich will allow greater scalability. This solution comes with a high speed data transferconnecting the processors through a fiber optic network. This new optical computing interconnect (OCI) chiplet allows the Co-packaged optical I/O in data centers and HPC applications.

The OCI chiplet supports up to 64 transmission channels with 32 Gbps in each direction and with a length of up to 100 meters. This will allow the infrastructure for AI to be provided with Greater bandwidth, lower consumption and greater range. It will also allow in the future the interconnection of CPU and GPU clustersin addition to the expansion of memory and resource disaggregation. This technology could replace the current interconnection based on copper wires which, although they have good bandwidth and low consumption, They only allow ranges of less than one meter.

This OCI chiplet has Intel silicon photonics technology and is fully integrated. It also has a silicon photonic integrated circuit that includes lasers that emit this light and optical amplifiers to improve reach. Although in the presentation it has been used with an Intel CPU, it can also be integrated into GPUs IPUs and other SoCs next generation.

In this first implementation, and thanks to its 64 channels, it is possible to offer a bidirectional bandwidth up to 4 Tbps and is also compatible with the PCIe 5 peripheral interconnect. This technology has been possible thanks to internal research for more than 25 years, where Intel has been a pioneer in this type of solutions. For now, this OCI chip is a prototypeIntel is working with partners to improve this technology and integrate it into your systems as an optical I/O solution.

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