Intel pushes speed, reliability claims with its new MXC cable
An optical interconnect introduced by Intel on Wednesday may someday slim down cabling throughout data centers if the company can get enough vendors to mass-produce it.
The interconnect, which Intel is calling MXC, is designed to offer high speed with a long reach and a relatively low cost. Intel developed MXC with Corning and showed it off at a press event in San Francisco. Its next goal is to publish the MXC specification so fiber manufacturers can start using it to develop new products, said Victor Krutul, director of business development and marketing at Intel's Silicon Photonics Operation.
MXC is protocol-agnostic and could be used for network links throughout a data center, over technologies that could include Terabit Ethernet, Krutul said. At Wednesday's event, Intel used it to connect two trays of microservers to each other in a demonstration rack. The fiber could also be used to link servers to a top-of-rack switch, connect a series of those switches to a bigger switch at the end of a row, or form the backbone of the data-center network, Krutul said.
