

Intel's fastest connector to date uses light to transfer data at 1.6Tbps - jlarkin353
http://www.recaply.com/intels-fastest-connector-to-date-uses-light-to-transfer-data-at-16tbps.html

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DiabloD3
Why does Intel even discuss these things? Can I buy this? Can I go out and buy
products that use this standard? Can I buy PCs that use AMD CPUs that use
this? What about ARMs? What about Infiniband-like networks?

It makes me angry that a large corporation set out on a Tuesday morning with
the sole purpose to waste people's time like this. If it is not going to be on
store shelves within the next few months and if it doesn't have broad industry
support: NO ONE CARES.

This is why Thunderbolt has been a failure: they talked about it for over two
years and the final version is Intel-only, effectively Mac only (very few non-
Apple PCs have it, and it seems most of them were bought just to be
Hackintoshes), and not nearly as awesome as what they originally described;
and AMD, Texas Instruments, VIA, and several other VESA members added a
USB3-over-DisplayPort feature called DockPort because Intel refuses to license
and standardize Thunderbolt.

You can downvote me if you want, but I imagine at least half of us have been
thinking this and someone had to just come out and say it: advertise your
product when I can buy it, otherwise it just looks like you're trying to pimp
your stock to investors.

~~~
wmf
Intel has a habit of putting out PR that mixes stuff that is available now,
stuff that will be shipping this year, and stuff that may or may not be
shipping five years from now. The press loves it but it's annoying and
confusing to us technical people. (Whatever you do, do not pay any attention
to "rack scale architecture".)

When it comes to silicon photonics specifically, Intel has been talking about
it for years and still hasn't shipped anything.

~~~
DiabloD3
Yeah what happened to that? It looked interesting and completely vanished off
the face of the Earth.

~~~
wmf
Making silicon photonics cheaper than VCSELs must be really hard because it
seems like nobody is shipping them. Or maybe silicon photonics are only cost-
effective for parallel fiber optics which are a pretty small fraction of the
market.

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jws
First, the headline number comes from 64 25gbps fibers in parallel.

I found more interesting this little bit buried in the bottom quarter of the
article…

 _Intel is proposing an Optical PCI-Express (OPCI) protocol for use on optical
wires._

I cant find this protocol, or any clarification if it is an open protocol. The
article kind of feels like it is protocol intended for widespread adoption.

Cost effective, space effective optical connections would be nice. (No pricing
in article. Not terribly encouraging hints.) A clean, open, PCIe protocol for
fiber would be huge.

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roeme
I presume that over the next decade(s), Cu may be phased out and replaced by
Fibre on a large scale for information transfer purposes.

I do wonder about the effects on our environment though, namely wether making
copper (metal) or Fibre cables (plastics) produces more waste, uses more or
less energy and which one's easier to recycle, and to what degree.

~~~
davidad_
Naïvely, glass is made from sand and copper is mined. And I can already
recycle glass from my house, but not copper. So it looks like an environmental
win to me. There may be something I'm missing.

~~~
shalmanese
Copper is pretty trivially recyclable, which is why you get reports of drug
addicts stealing copper piping from people's houses to sell on the black
market.

~~~
bigd
And bridges!!! [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/bridge-stolen-in-
cz...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/bridge-stolen-in-czech-
republic-slavkov_n_1465806.html)

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TheLoneWolfling
_The ability to take my memory and stash it a rack away, optical can enable
that_

In optical fiber, at a minimum, every 3.3cm is another clock cycle of delay.
(2 _10^8 m /s / 3GHz / 2) (speed of propagation in optical fiber / clock rate
/ round trip factor).

That being said, being able to have _hard drives* in other racks would be
great, if nothing else just for vibration concerns.

