Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Wrap Up

Silicon Photonics

While this is a bit out of the realm of our normal discussion, part of Gelsinger's speech was about Silicon Photonics - the modulation of data onto wavelengths of light. The future of this technology is very bright (no pun intended) because it could eventually be brought down to the chip level where datapaths within the CPU are made out of optical connections using multiple wavelengths of light to send tremendous amounts of data.

Of course no mention of forward-looking technology would be complete without a silicon wafer shot; this one above is a wafer of some of Intel's Si-Photonics devices and doesn't actually implement any light datapaths on chip as that's quite a while away.

Final Words

This concludes our coverage of the Spring 2002 Intel Developer Forum which has undoubtedly been the most interesting conference over these past several months. If you haven't kept up with all of our coverage be sure to go back and read the earlier IDF articles since the technology we've been talking about will surely pop up in future discussions as it matures.

- Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 1
- AMD's Hammer in Action: The most impressive demo of IDF
- Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 2
- Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 3
- Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 4

We hope you enjoyed our coverage and now it's back to the normal product reviews.