The need for silicon photonics is more urgent due to the demands of increasingly powerful AI models that are straining existing data center infrastructures. Intel's OCI chiplet can support a maximum of 64 channels of 32 gigabytes-per-second data transmission in each direction on up to 100 meters of fiber optic cables. This is a significant development for data center operators looking to scale up clusters made up of CPUs and graphics processing units. The OCI chiplet is still a prototype, but Intel is working with select customers to co-package it within their existing systems-on-chip as an optical I/O solution.
Key takeaways:
- Intel has showcased the industry’s first-ever fully integrated bidirectional optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet, designed to significantly improve high-bandwidth data interconnect performance.
- The technology combines silicon integrated circuits with semiconductor lasers to deliver faster data transfers over longer distances, enabling higher-bandwidth data transfers and software-configurable access to compute and storage resources.
- Intel's OCI chiplet can support a maximum of 64 channels of 32 gigabytes-per-second data transmission in each direction on up to 100 meters of fiber optic cables, making it suitable for scaling up data center operations.
- The OCI chiplet is still a prototype, but Intel is working with select customers to co-package it within their existing systems-on-chip as an optical I/O solution.