This paper analyzes the physical potential, computing performance benefi t and power consumption of optical interconnects. Compared with electrical interconnections, optical ones show undoubted advantages based on physical factor analysis. At the same time, since the recent developments drive us to think about whether these optical interconnect technologies with higher bandwidth but higher cost are worthy to be deployed, the computing performance comparison is performed. To meet the increasing demand of large-scale parallel or multi-processor computing tasks, an analytic method to evaluate parallel computing performance ofinterconnect systems is proposed in this paper. Both bandwidth-limit model and full-bandwidth model are under our investigation. Speedup and effi ciency are selected to represent the parallel performance of an interconnect system. Deploying the proposed models, we depict the performance gap between the optical and electrically interconnected systems. Another investigation on power consumption of commercial products showed that if the parallel interconnections are deployed, the unit power consumption will be reduced. Therefore, from the analysis of computing influence and power dissipation, we found that parallel optical interconnect is valuable combination of high performance and low energy consumption. Considering the possible data center under construction, huge power could be saved if parallel optical interconnects technologies are used.
