I don't think the win here will be speed, particularly chip level as much as enabling lower power and higher throughout architectures at the system level. As in this is mote likely to be used for medium range links where infiniband/pcie/nvlink are used today.

> Photonic can only be up to 20% faster...

How did you come up with that number? The speed of travel? That's not really the main bottleneck in current computer architectures, at least not yet.

Using photons would enable quite different architectures that we haven't even conceived of yet.