At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2024, Intel gave us a particularly interesting glimpse at what could be the future of chip and interconnect design. The Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) chiplet integrates a Photonics Integrated Circuit (PIC) with an electrical IC. The chiplet was packaged with an Intel CPU and shown running live data.
Intel believes this technology is a game changer as it meets increasing demand for higher bandwidth across greater distances, while using less power.