Intel Corporation has made a significant advancement in integrated photonics technology for high-speed data transmission. At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2024, Intel’s Integrated Photonic Solutions (IPS) Group showcased the industry’s first fully integrated optical computing interconnect (OCI) chiplet, combined with an Intel CPU and actively transmitting data. This OCI chiplet breakthrough enables packaged optical input/output (I/O) in emerging AI infrastructures for data centers and high-performance computing applications.
Thomas Liljeberg, senior director of Product Management and Strategy at Intel’s IPS Group, highlighted the strain on current data center infrastructure due to the increasing data movement between servers. He emphasized that Intel’s OCI chiplet provides a solution to seamlessly integrate silicon photonic interconnect solutions into next-generation computing systems. This innovation increases bandwidth, reduces power consumption, and extends range, facilitating machine learning workload acceleration in high-performance AI infrastructure.
The OCI chiplet supports 64 channels of 32 gigabits per second (Gbps) data transmission in each direction over up to 100 meters of optical fiber. This advancement is expected to meet the demands for higher bandwidth AI infrastructure, lower power consumption, and longer transmission distances. The integration of the OCI chiplet enables future scalability of CPU/GPU cluster connectivity and novel computing architectures, enhancing AI acceleration workloads.
The growing deployment of AI-based applications globally, coupled with advancements in large language models and generative AI, necessitates more efficient machine learning models to meet emerging workload requirements. The need to scale computing platforms for AI is driving exponential growth in I/O bandwidth and reach to support larger CPU/GPU architectures and clusters. Optical I/O solutions like Intel’s OCI chiplet offer higher bandwidths, improved power efficiency, low latency, and extended reach, crucial for scaling AI/ML infrastructure.
The fully integrated OCI chiplet incorporates Intel’s silicon photonics technology, combining a silicon photonics integrated circuit with on-chip lasers and optical amplifiers alongside an electrical IC. This OCI chiplet demonstrated bidirectional data transfers of up to 4 terabits per second (Tbps) supporting Gen5 PCIe. The live optical link demonstration showcased strong signal quality with 32Gbps transmission speed, utilizing eight fiber pairs with dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) wavelengths.
Intel’s OCI chiplet represents a significant leap forward in optical computing interconnect technology, offering enhanced performance, energy efficiency, and scalability for AI infrastructure. This breakthrough holds the promise of revolutionizing high-performance AI systems, enabling seamless integration of optical I/O solutions for next-generation computing.
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