Future Tech : MCX Cables

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This week Intel has unveiled a new technology in data transferring called MCX.
MCX (which strangely is not an acronym for anything) has a total transfer rate of 1.6 Tbps!

Developed by Intel and produced in collaboration with US Conec, these data cables are already in the real world evaluation stage as of last week.
Conec expects to start shipping the MCX cables in Q3 of 2014 but not to consumers or general public. These cables are solely developed for supercomputers and high data transfer applications.
Some of the customers include Microsoft and IBM.
Intel has also announced that the technology is available to other cabling manufacturers.

In true Intel speak, the development of these MCX cables comes from a huge breakthrough in Silicon photonics technology.
The combines speed of the fibers peaks at 1.6Tbpis (Terabits per second) of distances of upto 300 meters in length. This is three times longer than currently utilised technologies in datacentres.
The fiber inside the cables transmits at 1310 nm wavelength (the wavelength used by Intel Silicon Photonics Modules) with low optical loss.
The MXC connector uses a lensed ferrule to carry light from one connector to the other, rather than physical fiber contact of the end faces as with traditional connector technology.

The development of the MCX cables was done in hope of replacing the traditional copper based cabling found in datacentres

The MCX connector supports upto 64 fibers per cable, with each fiber operating at 25Gbps which gives the total of 1.6Tbps.
Now this of course displays the full throughput of a cable if it was transmitting traffic in one direction (upload or download)
But in the real world, 32 fibers will be used for upload and 32 for download giving the cable a maximum of 800Gbps (Gigabits per second) bandwidth.

So with all advancements in technology, the question we ask ourselves is; so what does this mean to me? Well it could mean a DVD movie of around 4GB downloaded and on your hard drive in less than 1 second. – Not bad.
But until we can download full DVD’s with the speed of opening up Google in a web browser, we just have to wait and see how quicjly this technology gets adopted and utilised by the mainstream and hopefully we get our hands on some for testing.