Intel 3D Xpoint and Photonics

[Arthur Hanson]

Intel Silicon Photonics Is Back - Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) | Seeking Alpha

Will the combination of these two technologies allow Intel to totally dominate the data center and keep out the competition? Could these make inroads in the corporate market? The views and thoughts of the community are wanted on this question. Will this put up a wall to Nvidia entering the data center market? Any other takes on the impact of these two technologies acting together? I hope a good question will yield some interesting answers and angles from the community.

 

[Marty]

Badly formed question - Intel dominates the data center already. More correctly, will this technology allow them to hold on to it? Who knows. At best it helps them hold on to it. It is never really about technology as much as business factors. And since the technology has only been described in vague terms, we don't know the actual products that will result. In any case, Nvidia has a long way to go before they could begin to challenge Intel in this space.

 

[Andy Sun]

From this sentence in the article "Silicon Photonics to replace fiber optics and copper wires in data centers", I can be more or less certain that the person who wrote the article has very limited knowledge in this subject. Silicon photonics is simply a different method (using Si+InP instead of using all InP based materials) to make optical transceivers and it uses no less fibers than any other fiber optics interconnects which are already widely deployed in many data centers.

What Intel's silicon photonics gives you are:

- A type of onboard (or so-called embedded optics) optical transceiver on a mezzanine card. It uses a proprietary form factor to set barriers for 3rd parties although Intel also participates the industrial onboard optics consortium (COBO) which, on the contrary, tries to make a standard form factor

- Use proprietary type of fibers (from Corning) and optical connectors (from USConec) to further raise the barrier. Although it claims to use PCIe as its main communication protocol, I'd not surprise to see it'll add extra proprietary protocols within its Omni-Path frame.

btw, in data centers, optical link for 100m, 500m, and 2km are all well defined for 40G, 100G and soon for 400G with all MSA-based standard form factors and specs. It is really not for Intel to fill any blanks in technology.

So you can see basically, Intel's silicon photonics is less about superior technology (and even cost), it's part of the agenda to make every thing in data centers proprietary from CPU, chipset all the way to storage, communication and even data center fabric. It's actually not a bad strategy in my own point of view but the whole package may not go as far as its CPUs go in many cases.

btw, Luxtera is really trying to use silicon photonics to address MSA/standard based open market of data center optics (specifically for <500m link). It however has to compete fiercely on cost in this difficult market.