Ron Wilson, Intel FPGA
August 14, 2018
How fast can you force data through a pair of wires? It is a trick question, of course. The answer depends on the wires, the material and geometry around them, the distance, and your choice of transceiver technology. Worst-case, your answer may be tens of megabits per second (Mbps). In even modest data networking applications the answer may be a hundred times that speed.
But look inside the most demanding data centers and supercomputers. There, the incredible pressure of growing CPU core density, hardware accelerator speed, and memory bandwidth are forging new serial communications technology, much as the inconceivable temperatures and pressures within start fuse nuclei into new, heavier elements that are eventually blasted out into the universe at large.