Intel Unveils Optical Compute Interconnect Chiplet: Adding 4 Tbps Optical Connectivity To CPUs or GPUs

Intel has introduced an advanced optical input/output chiplet, marking what it claims to be a significant leap in data center technology. The optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet, unveiled at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference 2024, is designed for integration with CPUs and GPUs and boasts 64 PCIe 5.0 channels transmitting 4 Tbps over 100 meters using fiber optics. Tom's Hardware adds: The chiplet uses dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) wavelengths and consumes only five pico-Joules per bit, significantly more energy-efficient than pluggable optical transceiver modules, which consume about 15 pico-Joules per bit, according to Intel. This device is crucial for next-generation data centers and AI/HPC applications. It will enable high-performance connections for CPU and GPU clusters, coherent memory expansion, and resource disaggregation. These features will be handy for operating supercomputers for large-scale AI models and machine learning tasks that require tremendous data bandwidth.

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