At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference 2024, Intel gave us a particularly interesting glimpse at what could be the future of chip and interconnect design. Theintegrates a Photonics Integrated Circuit with an electrical IC. The chiplet was packaged with an Intel CPU and shown running live data.
Although the OCI is a prototype, it already supports up to 4 terabits per second bidirectional data transfer across distances as far as 100 meters. Importantly, the technology is compatible with PCIe 5.0, making it relatively easy to integrate into existing PCIe compatible infrastructure. The OCI chiplet can be integrated with future CPUs, GPUs and SoCs. Should the technology reach the consumer space in the years ahead—and if it takes off in the enterprise space there's little reason to doubt it will—then PCs in the years ahead could look very different.