OSNews

If I remeber correctly, it was also mentioned on osnews at the time.

From the article, so I guess I was wrong:

"This research is separate from Intel's Light Peak technology, though both are components of Intel's overall I/O strategy. Light Peak is an effort to bring a multi-protocol 10Gbps optical connection to Intel client platforms for nearer-term applications. Silicon Photonics research aims to use silicon integration to bring dramatic cost reductions, reach tera-scale data rates, and bring optical communications to an even broader set of high-volume applications. Today's achievement brings Intel a significant step closer to that goal."

I'm not impressed. Cisco had OC-768c/STM-256c (that's 40 Gbps to non-networking geeks)introduced and already installed back in 2007. (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2007-07-19-swedi...) This was published just before intel announced their 40Gbps stuff. Not only that but dense wave division multiplexing has been around for 10GBps for even longer than that and you could multiplex up to 32 channels of 10Gbps into one fiber pair. That's 320Gbps people. The only thing new here is that it's being done all on one chip with integrated lasers and multiplexing at 12.5 Gbps per channel. The video on that site also implies that other modules could be linked with the first.Sounds like more multiplexing to me. Like I said.... Not impressed.

That's a huge difference. It's a completely different application with very different requirements (most importantly power consumption and very short range).

As far as networking goes, people are now trying to use 100Gb/s long haul connections and probably even faster links at shorter distances. But these solutions (because of optics and power dissipation) are not suitable for integration on a single chip.

OTOH, Intel's chip has to compete with traditional wire-line transmission, which can now achieve similar performance (10Gb/s is standard, ~30Gb/s is in development) and don't require special process and package solutions. Electrical solutions typically are limited to a several tens of IO channels per chip (require several "pads" per channel for building a transmission line) and this (plus larger range) is where optical solution could potentially have an advantage.

This kind of counter announcement is standard in the industry. AMD just released Bulldozer, so Intel has to release something too - even if they already released it.