Optical Interconnects between Microprocessor and Memories

More memories will be required in a future server as the number of cores per microprocessor keeps growing, which means either the capacity of a memory chip or the number of memory chips connected to a microprocessor needs to catch up with the increasing core counts. With electrical interconnects between microprocessor and memories, layout and placement of memory chips around the microprocessor becomes a bottleneck. Optical interconnects will solve this problem by putting memory chips further away from a microprocessor. We investigate in this paper the performance of a computer with optically connected remote memory instead of electrically connected local memory, and verified that an operating system can successfully run with only optically connected memory. The experimental results demonstrated the feasibility of utilizing optically connected remote memory as memory instead of storage as discussed mostly in the literature.