Intel presents Optical Fiber Data Transmission Technology

Intel is initially deploying optical fibers that will use laser and light to move data faster within the computer, replacing the old and slow wire technology currently used by most computers.

Intel's silicon photon technology will be applied on the motherboard and rack layers and use light to transmit data between storage, network, and computing resources. Light is considered to be a much faster transmission method than copper cables.

At the Open Computing Summit, Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner said that silicon photon technology will become part of a new generation of servers, these servers will require faster network, storage, and processing subsystems.

At this meeting, Intel and the server manufacturer Quanta Computer demonstrated a prototype server rack architecture using optical module mobile data, which uses Intel chips, it also supports the Xeon processor of the chip manufacturer and the Atom server chip.

Rattner said that this is Intel's lab's research result over a decade. The silicon photon technology can achieve 100 Gbit/s transmission speed and use less power, this technology integrates power supplies and fans in the data center to reduce component costs.

Intel's research focuses on the production of devices that need to deploy silicon photon at The Rack level, including the modulation and detector. At present, the company is producing a silicon photonics module with a transmission speed of 100 Gbit/s bps and providing it to some customers for testing.

Rattner said that the silicon photon may redefine the server design. With high-speed bandwidth, processing and storage units can be decoupled from servers and stored in separate units. After the deployment of silicon photon, the server design will change significantly.

Intel is working with Facebook to define new server technologies, which will lead to decoupling of computing, network, and storage resources. High-bandwidth connections provided by silicon photon will be the key to implementing this rack technology. processors, switches, and other modules need to be integrated for power management, protocol support, and load balancing. To achieve high-speed data transmission.

Intel has used optical fiber in its Thunderbolt connector technology. In addition, Intel is actively promoting silicon photon technology to the data center, which may be implemented in less than five years.

Intel said it would deploy InfiniBand Network Technology in its chips to achieve faster data transmission.

Dean McCarron, chief analyst at Mercury Research, said it was only time to replace copper cables with optical fiber.

Initial deployment may be expensive and may require the introduction of high-speed data transmission protocols, but the resulting speed will surprise you. "The signal will become more and more complex and we will have to move to photon technology," McCarron said ."