Intel shows off 8-wavelength silicon laser

I really miss the -F series cores with integrated OmniPath. It was such a minor additional cost, a great option to have. Discontinued 2019[1], last seen on Skylake Xeons[2] from July 2017. I don't know how what % of deploys used optical, but being able to forgo dedicated nic seems so imminently sensible to me.

Hoping we see a return to this idea. Not just for networking either. With PCIe 7.0 and CXL on the horizon, I'd love for motherboards to shrink radically in size, stop being backplanes, & just expose some ports. Another commenter in a PCIe 7.0 thread noted that cables are often better signal integrity than motherboards, owing to their excellent shielding[3]. Having a core designed to expose fabric, rather than local signals, would be awesome.

If Intel really can pull off packaging the photonics too on a chiplet, that could absolutely change the game.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-omni-path-200-fabric...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Sk...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31917010