Meet Pete. Pete Cibula, Jr. has a job that most geeks would kill for. His daytime existence is spent making sure that when you want fast service from your cloud service provider (whether that’s OnLive, Amazon, or Google), the speed is there. When you want to transfer half of a terabyte over your LAN, Pete’s work is part of why that process doesn’t take several days. Cars, tanks, slot machines, space shuttles, TVs, and plenty more all share the common thread of Ethernet. Pete’s job is to make sure that when the world needs to move beyond 1 Gb/s this year, the bandwidth will be there, the ports will work, the cabling won’t crush data streams, and the world’s communications will continue to advance.

Pete isn’t alone, obviously. Several manufacturers work in the networking silicon space. But Intel has a position of prominence and legacy that is unique. Most of us hardly give a second thought to Intel’s role in Ethernet development, but the efforts of Pete and his colleagues are literally helping to shape the networking experiences every one of us will enjoy and depend on in the near future.

The work they do happens in several rooms of the Jones Farm 3 building at one of Intel’s Hillsboro, OR campuses. As in our prior Western Digital venture, Tom's Hardware teamed up with pro photographer Gary Wilson to explore and reveal the little-known world of…Intel’s X-Lab.