Last December DailyTech reported on
IBM's work involving light-based microchip interconnects for
multi-core processors. Just this month IBM demonstrated a nanophotonic
switch to help control the flow of optical data. IBM seems to be on
the fast track to bringing photonic waveguide interconnects to bear.
But IBM isn't the only company working with lasers. Today, Sun Microsystems announced a $44 million, DARPA funded
project to research their version of the waveguide interconnect.
The leverage behind photonic microchip
interconnects is multi-fold. Not only can more data be transmitted
through light than through electricity, the power needed for the same
amount of data is many times less, the heat generated is minimal, and
the space needed for the physical part of the interconnect is much
smaller thanks to not having to deal with things like leakage and
heat.
The underlying idea behind Sun's new
interconnect is that each chip in an array would be able to
communicate directly with any other chip via waveguided lasers. This
would eliminate the bottlenecks that multi-processor systems and
supercomputers deal with currently when data must be transferred
between chips. The new system is expected to be
able to move several billion bits of data per second within the array.
“This is a high-risk program. We
expect a 50 percent chance of failure, but if we win we can have as
much as a thousand times increase in performance,” said Ron Ho, a
Sun researcher and co-leader of the interconnect project in a New
York Times interview.
Sun's new waveguide interconnect competes directly with IBM's recently announced waveguide alternative. IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard lost the DARPA bid.
However, Sun representatives emphasize the reason they were chosen over the other candidates for the funding revolved around how close the company is to commercializing the technology. Sun demonstrated its first waveguide interconnect in 2003.
The real feat, a struggle for all the chip manufacturers to date, has been precisely aligning semiconductors that use waveguide interconnects. So far though, the only real application Sun touts is processor-to-processor transmission.
Sun dubs each group of processors connected via the waveguide interconnect as a "macrochip." The individual processors inside the macrochip will communicate to each other at such high transmission rates that they will replace a traditional processor node or blade in a high performance setup.
Sun's new macrochip system could
pave the way to a new generation of super computers or it could end
up a flop. Either way, they still face competition from other groups
like IBM, Intel and Hewlett Packard and MIT. One of these systems
will likely work and the future of multi-core and multi-CPU
interconnects looks very bright indeed.