In a keynote address at Photonics West, HP researcher Ray Beausoleil said that over the next ten years dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and optical interconnects are inevitable at distances of a few millimeters and above. He explained that the shift from copper links is needed to serve computer processors that could scale to 256-core CPUs projected to arrive by 2017, delivering as much as 10 Teraflops of performance. Such chips will need as much as 20 TFlops bi-directional bandwidth to support a relatively flat programming model.
HP Calls for On-Chip Optics
January 28, 2009