[Intel showcases fully integrated optical I/O chiplet. (Image Credit: Intel Corporation)]
Santa Clara (California): Tech giant Intel Corporation's Integrated Photonics Solutions (IPS) Group showcased the industry’s most advanced and first-ever fully integrated Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) chiplet co-packaged with an Intel CPU and running live data.
Intel’s OCI chiplet represents a leap forward in high-bandwidth interconnect by enabling co-packaged optical input/output (I/O) in emerging AI infrastructure for data centers and high performance computing (HPC) applications.
Key Highlights
A chiplet is a tiny integrated circuit (IC) containing a well-defined subset of functionality. It is designed to be combined with other chiplets on an interposer in a single package.
Intel's first OCI chiplet is designed to support 64 channels of 32 gigabits per second (Gbps) data transmission in each direction on up to 100 meters of fiber optics and is expected to address AI infrastructure’s growing demands for higher bandwidth, lower power consumption and longer reach.
The chiplet enables future scalability of CPU/GPU cluster connectivity and novel compute architectures, including coherent memory expansion and resource disaggregation.
How It Works
Intel's fully Integrated OCI chiplet leverages the company's field-proven silicon photonics technology and integrates a silicon photonics integrated circuit (PIC), which includes on-chip lasers and optical amplifiers, with an electrical IC.
The OCI chiplet demonstrated at OFC was co-packaged with an Intel CPU but can also be integrated with next-generation CPUs, GPUs, IPUs and other system-on-chips (SoCs).
This first OCI implementation supports up to 4 terabits per second (Tbps) bidirectional data transfer, compatible with peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) Gen5.
The live optical link demonstration showcases a transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) connection between two CPU platforms over a single-mode fiber (SMF) patch cord.
The CPUs generated and measured the optical Bit Error Rate (BER), and the demo showcases the Tx optical spectrum with 8 wavelengths at 200 gigahertz (GHz) spacing on a single fiber, along with a 32 Gbps Tx eye diagram illustrating strong signal quality.
The current chiplet supports 64 channels of 32 Gbps data in each direction up to 100 meters (though practical applications may be limited to tens of meters due to time-of-flight latency), utilizing eight fiber pairs, each carrying eight dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) wavelengths, Intel said.
Why Fully Integrated Optical I/O Chiplet Matters
AI-based applications are increasingly deployed globally, and recent developments in Large Language Models (LLM) and Generative AI are accelerating that trend.
Larger and more efficient machine learning (ML) models will play a key role in addressing the emerging requirements of AI acceleration workloads.
"The need to scale future computing platforms for AI is driving exponential growth in I/O bandwidth and longer reach to support larger processing unit (CPU/GPU/IPU) clusters and architectures with more efficient resource utilization, such as xPU disaggregation and memory pooling", Intel said.
Electrical I/O (i.e., copper trace connectivity) supports high bandwidth density and low power but have their own limitations.
"On the other hand, pluggable optical transceiver modules used in data centers and early AI clusters can increase reach at cost and power levels that are not sustainable with the scaling requirements of AI workloads.
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