Intel Launches Silicon Photonics Chip, Previews Next-Gen Phi for AI

At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager Diane Bryant announced the launch of Intel's Silicon Photonics product line and teased a brand-new Phi product, codenamed "Knights Mill," aimed at machine learning workloads. With the introduction of Silicon Photonics, Intel is debuting two new 100G optical transceivers. Sixteen years in the making, the small form-factor design fuses optical components with silicon integrated circuits to provide 100 gigabits per second over a distance of two kilometers. Initial target applications include connectivity for cloud and enterprise datacenters as well as Ethernet switch, router, and client-side telecom interfaces. Microsoft is adopting the technology for its scale-loving Azure datacenters.