[DiabloD3]

Why does Intel even discuss these things? Can I buy this? Can I go out and buy products that use this standard? Can I buy PCs that use AMD CPUs that use this? What about ARMs? What about Infiniband-like networks?

It makes me angry that a large corporation set out on a Tuesday morning with the sole purpose to waste people's time like this. If it is not going to be on store shelves within the next few months and if it doesn't have broad industry support: NO ONE CARES.

This is why Thunderbolt has been a failure: they talked about it for over two years and the final version is Intel-only, effectively Mac only (very few non-Apple PCs have it, and it seems most of them were bought just to be Hackintoshes), and not nearly as awesome as what they originally described; and AMD, Texas Instruments, VIA, and several other VESA members added a USB3-over-DisplayPort feature called DockPort because Intel refuses to license and standardize Thunderbolt.

You can downvote me if you want, but I imagine at least half of us have been thinking this and someone had to just come out and say it: advertise your product when I can buy it, otherwise it just looks like you're trying to pimp your stock to investors.

[AlisdairO]

This is a replacement for something like infiniband. It's not likely to be consumer-level tech.

[userbinator]

> because Intel refuses to license and standardize Thunderbolt.

Openness is definitely a big issue, and technical advantages may not be able to overcome proprietariness and cost. It's similar to what happened with Firewire (1394) and USB. The former has many technical advantages, but the official standards are not free. The latter is simpler and slower, with freely available standards, and as a result it has become ubiquitous.

[wmf]

Intel has a habit of putting out PR that mixes stuff that is available now, stuff that will be shipping this year, and stuff that may or may not be shipping five years from now. The press loves it but it's annoying and confusing to us technical people. (Whatever you do, do not pay any attention to "rack scale architecture".)

When it comes to silicon photonics specifically, Intel has been talking about it for years and still hasn't shipped anything.

[DiabloD3]

Yeah what happened to that? It looked interesting and completely vanished off the face of the Earth.

[wmf]

Making silicon photonics cheaper than VCSELs must be really hard because it seems like nobody is shipping them. Or maybe silicon photonics are only cost-effective for parallel fiber optics which are a pretty small fraction of the market.

[ddalex]

If ^this^ is not FUD, I don't know what FUD is. Textbook example.

Seriously, all this post is about is: let's add a layer of confusion and fear on a technological advance. "waste people's time" - haha, nobody forced you to spent time on this. "not being on AMD CPUs, only on Intel Macbooks " - This is a press release about something working in the lab, let's not have anybody announce anything they got in the lab because I can't buy it.

Driving confusion much, are we now ?

[XorNot]

He's right though.

Unless this is going to result in Intel products which actually have some broad market acceptance, who cares?

Because nobody cares about Thunderbolt. We were promised "fast enough to use external graphics cards" - you know, if you can accept max 4x PCI-e, and are willing to pay as much as a new GPU and computer to drive it for a suitable enclosure.

High speed data over fibre has been in the lab for years, and at these speeds and higher. Implementing it in a lab is easy. Getting it into a product people can use, and expect to use with others, is evidently harder.

[ddalex]

Actually, if any would've been bothered to read the article, this is not consumer-grade technology. This is targeted at very special uses inside datacenters.

So we're talking apples and oranges here.