Written on July 4, 2008 – 7:50 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Intel is admittedly the biggest CPU manufacturer out there, but the Santa Clara giant is proficient in other fields too. Integrated graphics solutions, semiconductors, flash memory chips, and as of lately advanced network chips, according to Gizmodo.

MIT’s Tech Review has recently found out that Intel managed to concoct a new chip entirely made out of silicon that "can encode 200 gigabits of data per second on a beam of light." This is to be twice as fast as the fastest optical networks currently in use. The incredible thing is that scientists once said that silicon integrates can’t improve data transmissions and that’s why the current network infrastructures aren’t based on silicon, and thus can’t scale nearly as fast or cheaply as Intel's chip. Intel even claims that it’s also working on a fingernail-sized chip that can crunch a terabit of data.

In case you don’t have a clue about photonics, here’s a brief description of how Intel’s new chip works. It takes a beam of light and distributes it into eight channels, each of which has a modulator that encodes data onto light. These data-enriched beams are then recombined, and there you go. The entire process happens at a rate of 25Gbps per modulator, and Intel claims that this new chips demonstrates the fact that copper can and will be replaced by beams of light in the future CPUs and other such chips.

However, the copper replacement won’t occur until Intel first manages to cram 25 modulators onto a single chip, with each one running at 40Gbps, probably using hybrid lasers built onto the chip to toss light at the modulator instead of an optical fiber.