Intel Unveils First Fully Integrated Optical Compute Interconnect Small Chip
TapTechNews June 27th news, Intel announced that it has demonstrated the first fully integrated optical compute interconnect (TapTechNews note: Optical Compute Interconnect, OCI) small chip co-packaged with its CPU at the 2024 Optical fiber communication conference.
In the future, the OCI small chip can also be integrated with other xPUs and SoCs such as GPU and IPU.
Intel's fully integrated optical compute interconnect solution aims to address the exponentially increasing demand for I/O bandwidth in future AI computing platforms:
The existing electrical I/O connection can achieve high bandwidth and low power consumption, but the coverage is only 1 meter or even shorter, making it difficult to scalable AI infrastructure on a large scale;
While the pluggable optical transceiver module can achieve interconnect and extend the transmission distance, but it faces problems of high cost and high power consumption.
The optical interconnection solution co-packaged with the xPU processor can support higher bandwidth and longer transmission distance, while improving energy efficiency and reducing latency to meet the requirements of large-scale AI computing clusters.
This industry's most advanced OCI small chip consists of a silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) with on-chip DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) lasers and SOAs (Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers) and an electrical integrated circuit (EIC) that contains the complete electronic part of the optical I/O subsystem.
In other words, the OCI small chip does not require an external laser source or optical amplifier.
Intel's demonstrated co-packaged OCI small chip uses 8 pairs of optical fibers, each carrying 8 DWDM wavelengths, a total of 64 channels, and each channel can achieve a two-way 32 Gbps transmission rate, with a total bandwidth of 4 Tbps and a coverage of 100 meters.
In addition, this small chip uses the PCIe 5.0 transmission interface to communicate with the CPU.
The overall transmission power consumption of this co-packaged optical I/O solution is only 5 pJ/bit, about 1/3 of the pluggable optical transceiver module solution, which helps to reduce the pressure on the power supply of the AI data center.
In the future, Intel will continue to promote the evolution of OCI optical interconnection technology, aiming to achieve 64 Tbps of interconnect bandwidth by increasing the wavelength, increasing the transmission bandwidth and increasing the number of optical fibers by 2035:
