AnandTech: An executive visiting various research divisions across the globe isn’t necessarily new, but with a focus on social media driving named individuals at each company to keep their followers sitting on the edge of their seats means that we get a lot more insights into how these companies operate. The downside of posting to social media is when certain images exposing unreleased information are not vetted by PR or legal, and we get a glimpse into the next generation of technology. That is what happened over the weekend.
EVP and GM of Intel’s Client Computing Group, Gregory Bryant, last week spent some time at Intel’s Israel R&D facilities in his first overseas Intel trip in of 2021. An early post on Sunday morning, showcasing Bryant’s trip to the gym to overcome jetlag, was followed by another later in the day with Bryant being shown the offices and the research. The post contained four photos, but was rapidly deleted and replaced by a photo with three. The photo removed showcases some new information about next-generation Thunderbolt technology. In this image we can see a poster on the wall showcasing ’80G PHY Technology,’ which means that Intel is working on a physical layer (PHY) for 80 Gbps connections. Off the bat this is double the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4, which runs at 40 Gbps.
The second line confirms that this is ‘USB 80G is targeted to support the existing USB-C ecosystem,’ which follows along that Intel is aiming to maintain the USB-C connector but double the effective bandwidth. The third line is actually where it gets technically interesting. ‘The PHY will be based on novel PAM-3 modulation technology.’ This is talking about how the 0 and 1s are transmitted — traditionally we talk about NRZ encoding, which just allows for a 0 or a 1 to be transmitted, or a single bit. The natural progression is a scheme allowing two bits to be transferred, and this is called PAM-4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation), with the 4 being the demarcation for how many different variants two bits could be seen (either as 00, 01, 10, or 11). PAM-4, at the same frequency, thus has 2x the bandwidth of an NRZ connection.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.