Intel Rolling Out 800Gbps Cables This Year

phmadore writes "10Gbps cables are what are commonly used in large server centers today, but very soon, according to Ars, 800Gbps cables will be available from Intel. From the article: 'The new cables are based on Intel's Silicon Photonics technology that pushes 25Gbps across each fiber. Last year, Intel demonstrated speeds of 100Gbps in each direction, using eight fibers. A new connector that goes by the name "MXC" holds up to 64 fibers ... The fiber technology also maintains its maximum speed over much greater distances than copper, sending 800Gbps at lengths up to 300 meters, Intel photonics technology lab director Mario Paniccia told Ars. Eventually, the industry could boost the per-line rate from 25Gbps to 50Gbps, doubling the overall throughput without adding fibers, he said.'"

25 Gbps is the fastest the industry can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028095.500-ultrafast-fibre-optics-set-new-speed-record.html

At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference in Los Angeles last month, Dayou Qian, also of NEC, reported a total data-sending rate of 101.7 terabits per second through 165 kilometres of fibre. He did this by squeezing light pulses from 370 separate lasers into the pulse received by the receiver. Each laser emitted its own narrow sliver of the infrared spectrum, and each contained several polarities, phases and amplitudes of light waves to code each packet of information.

At the same conference, Jun Sakaguchi of Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo also reported reaching the 100-terabit benchmark, this time using a different method. Instead of using a fibre with only one light-guiding core, as happens now, Sakaguchi's team developed a fibre with seven. Each core carried 15.6 terabits per second, yielding a total of 109 terabits per second. "We introduced a new dimension, spatial multiplication, to increasing transmission capacity," Sakaguchi says.

Re:Like these?

[petermgreen]

Some cables are legitimately expensive because they are expensive to make. Some cables are expensive because they are a niche product and there is only one vendor and then some cables are stupidly expensive simply to prey on idiots.

These cables undoutablly will not be cheap but they may well be cheaper than terminating and patching all those fibers seperately for those few niches that really need that much bandwidth between the same pair of devices.

Re:Will we still talk ethernet over it?

[AK Marc]

I work with 100 Gbps that runs over a single pair. And doesn't use DWDM, so you can run 88 channels of it, for 8.8 Tbps. On a single fiber. And the fiber can be 20+ year old single mode (though results depend on quality). Industry standard, no new cabling. Intel is solving a problem that doesn't exist. Or maybe coming up with something not-new in a cheaper price point. 88-channel DWDM is expensive. I think we are paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000,000 per fully-populated 8.8Tbps link. But then, that's for optics capable of 1000+ mile transmission (with amplification). As the market is small for those speeds from server to switch or with any level of port density, so the price is not optimized for common use.

So from what I can tell, this is less than 1/10th the speed of common industry standard gear, but cheap. Since when did stories about price breakthroughs get front page (other than solar)?