Items tagged with Silicon Photonics
Intel announced a pair of new products today designed to boost data center efficiency, shrink footprints, and allow for faster deployments. The first are new microservers based on the C2000 (codename: Avoton) Atom architecture. We've discussed the Bay Trail Atom core several times and Intel's plans for the technology in the mobile space, but moving the hardware into data centers is a key component of Intel's microserver strategy. Based on what we know of Bay Trail/Avoton, we expect it will offer significantly improved performance over existing S1200 Atom servers, thanks to multiple microarchitechtural improvements and the integration of a quad-core processor rather than dual-core + Hyper-Threading....
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Electronic signaling using copper is officially old-and-busted—or at least Intel thinks it will be soon. The company announced today that it has constructed a silicon-based optical connection with an integrated laser that's capable of moving data at 50Gbps. The term "integrated laser" refers to the fact that the optical data connection is integrated into a microchip and interfaces with that component's circuitry. According to Intel, its Hybrid Silicon Laser technology has multiple advantages over traditional wires. In addition to the increased bandwidth, optical signals degrade much more slowly than their electrical counterparts. As such, cables can be considerably longer and thinner...
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Intel's Silicon Photonics Advancement Aims to Accelerate Future Computing, Communications SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 7, 2008 - Intel researchers have made the next advance in the field of Silicon Photonics by achieving world-record performance using a silicon-based Avalanche Photodetector (APD) that could lower costs and improve performance as compared to commercially available optical devices. The research results were published today in Nature Photonics.Silicon Photonics is an emerging technology using standard silicon to send and receive optical information among computers and other electronic devices. The technology aims to address future bandwidth needs of data-intensive computing applications...
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Well, I assume they do. They seem to know more about it than anybody. In a breakthrough paper delivered in the Optics Express journal, IBM has demonstrated their method for greatly improving the transfer of information between multiple computer chip cores, substituting optical signals sent through silicon for electrical pulses sent through copper wire. By greatly shrinking the size of the optical router, or modulator, IBM claims they'll be able to shrink a supercomputer-grade machine down to laptop size. A major challenge for scientists is finding a way to improve communication between [multiple] cores without increasing power consumption.The most promising solution is...
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