An interesting and informative article, going to the exact heart of where Poet is attempting to go. Sorry if it has been posted before ....

The first few paragraphs below, but there is more:

Will silicon photonics replace copper cabling in mainstream datacentres?

Traditional copper cabling is stifling datacentre evolution and high-performance computing (HPC) because of its slow data transfer capacity. Silicon photonics – which uses optical fibre for data transfers – increases bandwidth in servers and racks, improves data transfer speeds and reduces datacentre complexity. But are datacentres ready for it yet?

Silicon photonics is an evolving technology in which data is transferred among computer chips by optical rays (laser light), which can carry far more data in less time than electrical conductors can. The optical fibre is directly built into semiconductor chips to give IT “computing at the speed of light”.

Standard copper-based Ethernet networking is inadequate for HPC applications, datacentres or for managing growing data volumes efficiently, and IT is struggling to provide faster systems with more effective bandwidth and, hopefully, at lower cost to end users.

So why is silicon photonics (SiPh) important? In a TEDTalk documentary on YouTube, Intel fellow Mario Paniccia (pictured) says: “If you had the capability of transferring data at 50Gps between two devices, you are talking about transferring an HD movie in less than a second.”

As SiPh develops further, it can realise data transfer at 1Tbps in a cost-effective way. “That means you can transfer or download a whole season of HD TV from one device to another in less than a second,” says Paniccia. “It will allow us to keep up with Moore’s Law and we will not be limited by internal network speeds.”

see: http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Will-Silicon-Photonics-replace-the-humble-copper-cabling-in-mainstream-datacentres