It's a 7nm prototype CPU is designed to churn through massive data processing workloads at 1TB/s. It’s the first mesh-to-mesh photonic fabric that uses silicon photonic interconnects to link chips together.

Intel’s current Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is x86, which it developed in the late 1970s and has become the basis for almost all the best processors you can find today. But current-day CPUs run into scaling issues and aren’t efficient enough when trying to fulfill large data sets.

Intel’s latest 528-thread chip, by contrast, uses a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. These kinds of chips are well-suited to parallel processing and particularly useful for specific tasks. It’s vastly more power efficient than conventional architectures too.

terface such as those found on Xeon CPUs.

But the data it transmits uses silicon photonics chiplets, made in partnership with Ayar Labs, with the four chiplets converting electrical signals passing through the microprocessor into optical signals carried by 32 single-mode fibers. Each fiber carries data at 32GB/s, according to Intel, for a maximum bandwidth of 1TB/s. In testing, however, Intel only achieved half of that.

The thinking is to stitch 16 of the prototype chips together in a single Open Computer Project server in a sled form factor, with up to 10,000 sleds combined to unleash its full potential for the use case it was designed for.