Intel shows off first integrated optical compute interconnect for scaling up AI

This comes as a bit of a surprise, since Intel supposedly sold off their silicon photonics company last fall to Jabil? https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/31/intel_silicon_photoni...

This initial chip is going PCIe (and presumably eventually CXL or maybe UCE)... From Intel's press release:

> This first OCI implementation is a 4 Tbps bidirectional chiplet compatible with PCIe Gen5, supporting 64 lanes of 32 Gbps data in each direction over 10’s of meters, realized as eight fiber pairs each carrying eight DWDM wavelengths. Looking beyond this first device, the platform has line of sight to 32 Tbps chiplets.

I do wonder what would have happened if OmniPath hadn't been cancelled. Intel needed to get a lot faster, but at the time 100Gbit for very little extra $$ and being on chip seems so so excellent. As an Infiniband like it's low latency RDMA seemed so excellent. Feels weird seeing this swing back around, half a decade latter. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-omni-path-200-fabric...