I do wonder about the effects on our environment though, namely wether making copper (metal) or Fibre cables (plastics) produces more waste, uses more or less energy and which one's easier to recycle, and to what degree.
- There's a lot of plastic involved, for either medium
- optical stuff is pretty exacting to manufacture. It's easily possible that it's more energy-intensive to refine the materials, make the lasers, draw the fibers and so on than it is to make the copper equivalent
As a sibling comment noted, green energy probably isn't what we would hope it to be.
It makes me angry that a large corporation set out on a Tuesday morning with the sole purpose to waste people's time like this. If it is not going to be on store shelves within the next few months and if it doesn't have broad industry support: NO ONE CARES.
This is why Thunderbolt has been a failure: they talked about it for over two years and the final version is Intel-only, effectively Mac only (very few non-Apple PCs have it, and it seems most of them were bought just to be Hackintoshes), and not nearly as awesome as what they originally described; and AMD, Texas Instruments, VIA, and several other VESA members added a USB3-over-DisplayPort feature called DockPort because Intel refuses to license and standardize Thunderbolt.
You can downvote me if you want, but I imagine at least half of us have been thinking this and someone had to just come out and say it: advertise your product when I can buy it, otherwise it just looks like you're trying to pimp your stock to investors.
Openness is definitely a big issue, and technical advantages may not be able to overcome proprietariness and cost. It's similar to what happened with Firewire (1394) and USB. The former has many technical advantages, but the official standards are not free. The latter is simpler and slower, with freely available standards, and as a result it has become ubiquitous.
When it comes to silicon photonics specifically, Intel has been talking about it for years and still hasn't shipped anything.
Seriously, all this post is about is: let's add a layer of confusion and fear on a technological advance. "waste people's time" - haha, nobody forced you to spent time on this. "not being on AMD CPUs, only on Intel Macbooks " - This is a press release about something working in the lab, let's not have anybody announce anything they got in the lab because I can't buy it.
Driving confusion much, are we now ?
Unless this is going to result in Intel products which actually have some broad market acceptance, who cares?
Because nobody cares about Thunderbolt. We were promised "fast enough to use external graphics cards" - you know, if you can accept max 4x PCI-e, and are willing to pay as much as a new GPU and computer to drive it for a suitable enclosure.
High speed data over fibre has been in the lab for years, and at these speeds and higher. Implementing it in a lab is easy. Getting it into a product people can use, and expect to use with others, is evidently harder.
I found more interesting this little bit buried in the bottom quarter of the article…
Intel is proposing an Optical PCI-Express (OPCI) protocol for use on optical wires.
I cant find this protocol, or any clarification if it is an open protocol. The article kind of feels like it is protocol intended for widespread adoption.
Cost effective, space effective optical connections would be nice. (No pricing in article. Not terribly encouraging hints.) A clean, open, PCIe protocol for fiber would be huge.
In optical fiber, at a minimum, every 3.3cm is another clock cycle of delay. (210^8 m/s / 3GHz / 2) (speed of propagation in optical fiber / clock rate / round trip factor).
That being said, being able to have
hard drives* in other racks would be great, if nothing else just for vibration concerns.