To be implemented at rack and motherboard levels, the technology will be using light to transfer data between storage, networking and computing resources of the computer. Silicon photonics will enable communication at 100Gbps speeds while utilizing lower power as compared to copper cables.
Speaking about the technology during Open Compute Summit keynote, Justin Rattner, Intel’s CTO revealed that silicon photonics will be implemented in next generation of servers that would require faster networking, storage and processing subsystems. Rattner added that the architecture, being showcased at the conference, is a result of a decade of research carried out at Intel’s labs.
Intel is currently manufacturing silicon photonics modules capable of transferring data at 100Gbps speeds and is offering them to clients for testing purpose. Intel is working towards defining new server technologies in collaboration with Facebook in a bid to decouple computing, networking and storage resources.
Jason Waxman, general manager of the cloud platforms group, revealed that silicon photonics could be out there in near future and that multiple protocols that support high speed data transfers can be used including InfiniBand, Ethernet and PCI-Express notes PC World. Intel has revealed that it will be implementing InfiniBand networking technology at chip level to achieve faster data transfer rates.
