Intel unveiled its first direct mesh-to-mesh photonic fabric at the Hot Chips 2023 chip conference, highlighting its progress towards a future of optical chip-to-chip interconnects that are also championed by the likes of Nvidia and Ayar Labs. However, the eight-core 528-thread chip that Intel used for the demonstration stole the spotlight due to its unique architecture that sports 66 threads per core to enable up to 1TB/s of data throughput. Surprisingly, the chip consumes only 75W of power, with ~60% of the power being used by the optical interconnects, but the design could eventually enable systems with two million cores to be directly connected with under 400ns latency.
Intel's PUMA (Programmable Unified Memory Architecture) chip is part of the DARPA HIVE program that focuses on improving performance in petabyte-scale graph analytics work to unlock a 1000X improvement in performance-per-watt in hyper-sparse workloads.
