Expect plenty of tera/terror puns from the IT press soon, in the wake of Intel's announcement at the San Francisco IDF of "Tera Scale" a name that evokes all kinds of mental images apart from what it actually is.

What is it then? Well, it's Intel resurrecting parallel processing, but instead of having lots of separate processors, the vision is now to stick'em all inside a single CPU housing. That's like the current Core architecture, except Intel's now talking about 10-100 cores instead.

To ensure the cores can talk to each other without bottlenecks, Intel reckons the previously announced "optical interconnects" are the way forward. This is the "laser on silicon" technology that's currently coming out of Intel's labs, according to Dr Mario Paniccia, director of the chip giant's Photonics Technology Labs. Optical interconnects scale for performance almost indefinitely, and don't suffer the distance degradation that copper ones do - there's a parallel here to DSL actually.

So how far away is this? Dr Paniccia says that while Intel was able to move fast with the photonics interconnect, skipping several of the steps that researchers usually have to go through, we're still looking at five to six years before they'll go into commercial production.

Putting the laser on silicon is cheap, says Dr Paniccia says, partly because Intel can make use of its existing manufacturing resources. Using what's already there wasn't a driving factor behind the optical interconnect technology he adds when asked.

How far away are we from true optical computing? That's way off, according to Dr Paniccia. Silicon computing still has a long life ahead, as it's getting smaller and more efficient he says - and it's very cost-effective. He estimates that optical computing will appear in maybe fifteen to twenty years' time, mainly because it's up against cheap silicon.