Guest post by The words ‘Facebook’ and ‘open’ don’t necessarily go well together, until they do. And while they may hoard your data, they’ve contributed to openness in other ways. “In 2011 Facebook began the Open Compute Project, an effort among technology companies to use open-source computer hardware. Tech companies similarly shared intellectual property with Linux software, which lowered costs and spurred innovation. Facebook’s project has attracted many significant participants, including Goldman Sachs, Arista Networks, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.” An interesting read over at the New York Times.
The silicon photonics is really an Intel project, not directly related to the OpenCompute project. The only relation with OpenCompute is, that OpenCompute is a good platform to try throw ideas around and have people come up with ideas and designs of how they would want to use it.
Having said that. Silicon photonics always sounds amazing, Intel had predicted a couple of years ago they were working on it and going to release this ‘soon’.
Supposedly it is fairly cheap to produce, fairly flexible, lowpower and highspeed (100 Gbit/s). This is because the production processes are closely related to the processes for other silicon based products. For example it also involves the use of wavers.
In the keynote Intel told the audience they are currently out of the labs and in the factory stage where they work out how best to manufacture this in high volumes.
And they are also willing to license the technology to others. Supposedly for a fair price, whatever that means for a product that has been in development for a decade.
The protocols supported on these fibers are PCI Express and Ethernet if I remember correctly.
But have a look at the keynote on the http://www.opencompute.org/ website.
Edited 2013-01-21 21:59 UTC
Hopefully there’ll be some eventual trickle-down to consumer-level hardware, which hopefully would make it less of a crapshoot installing FLOSS operating systems on it.