Kushagra Vaid, GM, Azure Cloud HW Engineering from Microsoft joined Intel on stage to reveal that Microsoft is an early adopter of the Intel Silicon Photonics technology and they are using it in Azure data centers to drive scale. Intel silicon photonics PSM4 module will be deployed in Microsoft Azure for switch-to-switch connectivity and it offers up to 100Gbps of data transfer speeds. Intel Silicon Photonics is now in volume production and shipping in the form of 100G optical transceivers. The products, Intel Silicon Photonics 100G PSM4 (Parallel Single Mode fiber 4-lane) and Intel Silicon Photonics 100G CWDM4 (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing 4-lane) are small form-factor, high speed, and low power consumption products, targeted for use in data communications applications, in particular for switch-to-switch optical interconnects in data centers.
Microsoft is using Intel's Silicon Photonics in Azure data centers - MSPoweruser
It replaces copper wires with optical cables and electrons with light, while using the same manufacturing methods companies use to make processors. Today, these laser-based systems are capable of shuffling 100 Gigabits per second over cables up to 2 kilometers long. You’ll struggle to push 25Gbps over a 10-foot-long copper cable, Kushagra Vaid, who oversees infrastructure engineering for Microsoft’s cloud, said from stage at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco Wednesday. Vaid was speaking alongside Diane Bryant, executive VP and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, who announced availability of the chipmaker’s first two silicon photonics products: 100G optical transceivers for interconnecting data center network switches. According to Vaid, silicon photonics is the future of interconnection inside Microsoft’s cloud data centers. Intel’s announcement is just the first step. The company said the 100G technology will be followed by 400G interconnects for data center switches “within a couple of years.” The first two transceivers simply plug into switch front plates, but the company envisions future-generation products that are embedded in switch motherboards and eventually integrated with switch silicon itself.
Intel's First Silicon Photonics Gear for Data Center Networks Now Shipping | Data Center Knowledge