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Holy Grail "Opt-Chip" - 100GB/sec?
silicon_synapse writes, "ZDNET has a story about the new Opto-chip which can supposedly transfer data at 100GB per second. Yes, gigaBYTES. A two-hour digital movie could download in 1/20th of a second. The only problem is making the rest of the computer fast enough to take advantage of it. " The researchers are being published today in Science magazine and claim that the U.S. military will be using this as early as next summer. However, I think this is going to be another case of wait-and-see - the technology sounds a little too good - "spray on" application and such.
Slashdot has gotten itself into a worrying cycle of reporting the "latest technology" without spending one iota of time examining the moral and/or spiritual issues surrounding that technology. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to discuss technlogy that will allow the equivalent of a two-hour digital movie to be transferred in one-twentieth of a second (!) This should, at the very least, give us pause so that we may reflect for a moment on some of the tough issues that this technology brings up.
The Internet is a double-edged sword. While it has brought a wonderful resource to many people, it has also exposed our children to material that they simply should not see. It is currently legal for homosexual groups, Islamic groups, feminist groups, etc. to put up material on the World Wide Web, where it can be viewed by anybody, including your children. This is disturbing enough. But red-blooded Americans ought to be frightened at the prospect of groups like this having unlimited bandwidth.
Clearly, there are good uses for this bandwidth. For example, you child could download Charlton Heston's classic film The Ten Commandments in a fraction of a second (after paying for it, of course!) Imagine a world where you could go online with your sons and immediately be able to download demonstration videos for the latest assault rifles from Browning, Colt, or any one of our great gun makers. But that same technology could be used to serve up material about subjects that are morally unacceptable, such as lesbianism or liberalism. You would expect that companies such as Hewlett-Packard, which has a woman as its CEO, would quickly mobilize to use this technology to spread their hatred. Is this a good thing? No.
What we need is a group of men to study this technology and figure out how to use it for the moral good. I envision a committee of legislators (such as Bob Barr, Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, and Tom DeLay) would get together and decide what American and foreign companies should have access to this technology and what companies do not need it. This way, we can still foster the technology and allow it to grow while at the same time ensuring that it is not used to turn our children to lesbianism.
I was reading the RFC on Hot Grits yesterday, and from what I read hot grits can't be simulated at speeds over 100MB/S, unless they are cooled. Due to the fact that they are warm, they are ineffiecent and must be cooler to be transfered at 100GB/S
finally something that will keep up with the need.
I wonder if this will make it into the race for the new internet backbones?
palstic - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_7 04000/704324.stm
for the laypersons guide.
palstic - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_7 04000/704324.stm
for the laypersons guide.
FWIW, I can move 1TB of zeros from /dev/zero to /dev/null in 39.771 seconds on my computer. That works out to 25.747 GB/s. So even if we did nothing but send zeros back and forth, the computer would need to be faster to reach the full potential of the network.
For more useful applications, like watching pr0n, you would need an extremely quick bus (and video card). Although you wouldn't need to compress it (MPEG decompression is a bit costly), so you would gain there.
Sound has been for quite a while (probably for a few billion years, anyway), so finding a pre-sonal computer would be rather difficult. If they really are targetting this stuff at pre-sonal computers, I think they're making a big mistake, since they'll alienate a considerable amount of post-sonal computer owners.
Yeah, 100GB/sec over fibre, wonderful. And when will that fibre be wired into MY house? And who will do it?
I guess it's great for the rest of the industry that has access to high speed lines, but here I am, sending this post over a 33.6 connection.
No one will see fibre to their house for decades to come, so what difference does it make.
-kidlinux.
> you run the risk
> of lack of compatibility and thus you can only play a nitch and thus
> S&D kills you again
Just because you don't pronounce niche (neesh) that way doesn't mean you should spell it wrong too. Other than that, you're unfortunately right. Sorry, but niche is one of my pet peeves.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
The world doesn't end at the 49th parallel, you know. I want some of that broadband to come my way, if you don't mind :) add Halifax, Ottawa, Vancouver (probably left out at least one important one. TO is close enought to Ottawa. I don't know what to do with Montreal :)
Other than that, you've got one hell of an idea!
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I don't think anyone feels there's much of a "battle" anymore in this area. Organic materials (polymers, plastics and the like) show much better effects, work faster, are more damage resistant, cheaper, are easier to process, etc. The list of advantages actually is quite long.
Inorganic crystals are currently used in devices but they're on the way out.
-Geoff
> The article mentioned using this stuff to fab processors.
I think they meant that you can make the modulators using current processor manufacturing technology. I'm not on the side of making actual devices, but I assume you make patterns by using a mask and depositing around it. So you're limited by your ability to make a good mask.
IIRC, similar devices are already used in routers b/c even the crystalline devices currently used are faster than any other current technology.
The military is interested in making optical-driven vehicles. Right now, you could make a weapon by disrupting the electrical signals between controls and the vehicle. (So suddenly you can't adjust your flaps on your nice F-16.) So they want to switch to optical pipes between the computer and the flaps so this won't happen.
As far as flexibility or durability, it depends on the medium they're using. You'd need to see the Science article itself. I'd concentrate more on the durability side, which is very good. I don't know why you'd want to bend it.
-Geoff
Could I spray this stuff on my eyes? Contacts? Glasses?
Sounds like it would make studying much easier!
I don't think my eyes are even doing 56K....
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
So you say living a life of sin and having faith in Jesus means you will go to heaven? So if I led the whole human race away from God but believed in god myself I would get to sit with God?
But how can sacrificing anything (animal / son of god) take away my responsibility for my actions?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
visible light and radio waves are all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves are lower frequencies and light is a higher frequency. A Photon is a quanta or package of electromagnetic energy. Photons travel as waves and arrive and depart as particles, hence wave / particle duality.
As a photons travel at the same speed the frequency is a indication of the amount of energy in the package or quanta of of the electromagnetic energy. Higher frequency == more energy.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
So organised Catholic religion is bad because it does not emphasise Christ, but organised Christian religion which has the same practices as Catholic religion is good because it does emphasise belief in Christ.
I thought your earlier posts suggested that nothing can exist between a human and thier god and all that claimed to do so was bad.
So as long a someone claims a devotion to Christ then they are not guilty of sin, no matter what they do as a person, because Jesus died upon a cross to absolve them of all responsability for thier actions?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
If not I nominate you for the position of arch bigot. This would be an example of something I would not want my children to see without having a chance to expose it for the bullshit it is.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
So what about organised Christian religion, are they guilty of the same sins?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Captain Pedant to the rescue
Do you mean lower frequencies / longer wavelengths or higher frqencies / shorter wavelengths. Lower wavelengths and higher wavelengths don't mean much at all.
Captain Pedant runs away from the lynch mob as no one likes a smart ass.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
So you say that in order to find salvation for my soul I only need faith and faith alone. If i am the most despical monster on the planet it does not matter, only my faith does?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I wonder if the MPAA has just laid a dog egg in thier undergarments after hearing about this tech. :)
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Think about this, if you plug that into your computer that would be the stupidest thing for anyone to ever do. now, make me a CSU/DSU/Switch with that... Now we're talking. imagine, a 24 port switch with that as the backbone across town or as a backbone to anything! Hell, my current 100Mbit fiber connections are fast but when my servers transfer 8 videos at once (3 inserters each fiber node, several video libraries) it can bog that down fast. Now, think globally.. we have 100mbit connections and a very few gigabit connections on the trans-atlantic fibers... Slap these in place and Voila! instant bottleneck remover! Now dont think of this as cheap bandwidth, the trans-atlantic cable operators will charge you X dollars for X bandwidth, it dont matter if they pay 30% of that in operating cost or 0.00001%, They're the only game in town. That's why we ran our own fibers and ignored the telcos...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Which may service a floor of computers.
Thanks for the updated link. It looks like an impressive device, however, the web page states:
The NX64000 innovative switch fabric delivers 6.4 Tbps switch capacity per-chassisSo while this box does route -- and probably pretty fast -- the 6.4 Tbps number they quote is in fact for switching between interfaces across the backplane. Putting layer3 intelligence on top of this will (most likely) slow things down.
-BSince the link you gave is broken, I can't verify this but I believe that the Lucent NX64000 can switch at this speed, not route. There is a huge difference. Try applying an access list to 6.4 terabits (not bytes) per second and process switch it. It doesn't sound too likely to me
-BNeil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
So even with the alleged 100GB transmission speeds, the signal has to travel a certain distance, and the distance it can travel is limited by the speed of light.
When I was studying photonic chips about a year ago, the fastest CPU I could think of might have clocked out between 10-50 GHz.
Am I missing anything here?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
what are you talking about. current technology cant support this? do you think the technology on your desktop is as good as it gets.
Agreed.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
could leavethe laser pumping continuously at one wavelength and modulate it with this stuff.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that this new stuff is capable only of demodulating. It does the optics->electrons interface, but I saw nothing about it's ability to do the reverse electrons->optics.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
From what I understand, this just takes care of the nasty fiber(optic) -> wire(electrons) interface problem. It does nothing to make the pipes fatter or to make computers run faster. So yes, it looks like a useful gadget, but the applications are limited (at least until I network my house with fiber).
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'm really impressed, you got an absolutely content free moderated up to a 5.
You're paying ~$2000 for your average PC and you've already got supercomputer-level performance, although the supercomputer you're competing with is 10-15 years old. Hell my Palm III would put the top of the line 1950s mainframe to shame.
If tomorrow Intel or AMD found that they could manufacture a 1Ghz bus at a reasonable price the next computer you buy would have it. But if you want today's supercomputer-level performance you buy... that's right a supercomputer. But you'll pay... right again supercomputer-level price for it.
About the time this technology makes it way into the personal electronics market (if it ever does) you'll have a computer that can use all the bandwidth.
drewish
Now it's time to go meta-moderate and see if I can nail the people that moderated your message up.
How does all of this (new techonology, existing stuff from Lucent, et al) compare to terabit optical routing? (I have Sycamore Networks in mind, but would be interested in hearing about others as well.)
The announced technology talks about 100Mbs, which is still too slow compared to an all-optical network, if I understand everything correctly.
--binkley
Great article. Thanks for the link, I missed that back in March. Having the amount of bandwidth on tap that this article predicts would make some amazing changes not only to the telco industry, but to the entire computer industry and society as a whole.. wow
mmm... bandwidth... <drool>...
Yes, one day I may actually learn to spell...
Yeah, Ice, read The Bible.
It's all true. From the outset, The Bible may seem like any other book written by man. However, this book was penned by men, but written by God. Yes, that's right, this book has been certified as Truth by God. There have been thousands of religions over the course of humanity. Each of the peoples that follewed each of the non-Christian religions were certain that they understood the world and beyond. They were all wrong. Because they did not have a book certified by God. So forget yourself and all that you know and, for your sake, just follow the teachings of this book. You know it's all true. It's certified.
DeCSS (etc.) + Gnutella = The REAL Internet. Centralized control of media is for dinosaurs.
We're just getting this thing started! Organic chips that you spray on stuff. Ethernet cards with a maximun bandwidth of 100/mb/sec, oh, um...wait a sec..
(yes I know about gigabit ethernet, I've also seen the *actual* throughput)
--
+&x
Why stop at LANs/WANs when you could have each gubbins in your computer with a fibre interface. Then you could do away with all those mucky circuit board tracks and just have fibre cables between your processor, memory and disk drives. Power leads to each component would also be needed of course.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
How do you know that ? Did God told it to you in person ? Unless He did, I don't see why you should be an authority on it. After all only He decides the rules, not some drunk Anonymous Coward on Slashdot.
Which is why multicast is important.
At (what is hdtv?) 1900X1200x3x60 we could
multicast 243 RAW video streams to each house.
(410 Mb/sec/channel)
Compressed, assuming 8:1 compression (a modest compression) would give us 87.5 Gb/s, and 243
channels of HDTV per home. (not counting tha audio, but the audio bandwidth is negligible at these rates. (cuts it down to 86.6 Gb/s assuming cd-quality 5-channel sound/channel of hdtv)
Not bad at all.
So: Multicast is important!!
Which is another way of saying that there are fewer failure-modes for fibre-pipes vs. standard
conductors.
Another advantage of fibre that you didn't mention:
Lower maintanance!
For example: They have to check all the cables in
an F-16 periodically to look at insulator wear.
(because of short-circuits).
Fibre problems are easier to diagnose, because a potential "short circuit" would be incredibly difficult to cause, and because when a connection is degraded, (i.e. fibre is cut/close to cut) it is easy to diagnose without having to open up panels...
This is hilarious. I just read the first 5 posts on this article. All ACs, all score 0, but all good posts. What is wrong with the moderators? Why are these posts at the same level as the grits guy? Read at -1 moderators! In my opinion it signals a big problem that the /. moderation system wasn't designed to handle. Now that /. was a much larger readerbase, not everyone will be a member, and not everyone will bother to make an account. Also with the hidiously increasing number of trolls, moderators are increasingly moving to reading at 1 or above. That leaves out a lot of ACs who have a good point, but either don't want to bother to create an account, or have an unpopular viewpoint and don't want to endanger their account. I suggest that the moderation system be changed to something so you can browse based on what it was moderated to, not just the score. So people you could browse by insightful, or AC, and ignore the troll or flamebait posts. This would also require moderator to more activly moderate down the trolls, but they seem more willing to do that than moderate up the ACs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Don't get me wrong - Lucent has some very smart scientists and engineers, and some great technology comes out of the ol' Bell Labs, but Lucent also has a FUD machine at least as effective as Microsoft's - check out this article at LightReading for some of the dirt.
Personally I think broadcasts should be on their own dedicated line. Either via the air-waves or via dedicated bandwidth from our cable company.
I'd really hate to have interrupts while watching a comedy just becase my son is downloading some patch to his game. But this is exactly what would happen with multi-casted HDTV over a shared network connection.
I don't mind cable companies selling Internet access with the same fiber ( ideally this 100Gbps ) because they're going to dedicate bandwidth to their hundred some channels, and only sell net access for the remainder.
Plus, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to have a company BUY cable explicitly then wire it to every room in the office building / school than to multicast up to 100G/s from the internet. Sure then you've got 2 fibers comming into your building instead of one, but the cable company fiber is almost free ( minus the monthy charge, and assuming they've got fiber in your neighborhood ) Just think about how much a T1 line costs now. And we're talking about buying general purpose internet access ( which just so happens that 100G/s is going to the same multi-casted locations regularly ). This is no cheap purchase today.. And the rewiring of the entire internet backbone ( plus the streets from the trunk to your building ) are not cheap by any means.
I still do not like the idea of using general purpose hi-tech network connections for simple broadcasting. It's the idea of doing graphics processing in the general purpose CPU verses a dedicated, optimized seperate processor. Broadcasting belongs on their own seperate channel.
Telephone lines, on the other-hand, I think should migrate their way onto the internet.. They're not dedicated lines, in fact, they're pretty damn close to TCP connections. They just need a little more reliability than the current internet phones. ( Internet II perhaps? ) The biggest advantage that I find from this is that we can consume the unused bandwidth from normal phone lines that we share on our OC-X connections. I'm sure telephone companies already do forms of digital compression and silent block removals before hitting the trunk, but still..
As a disclaimer, I'm no expert in these fields.. These are simply opinions based on what I've read.
-Michael
-Michael
maybe wiring CAT5 into every room of every house, same as electricty and phone?).
Why not? Does this sound so laughable to you?
So is the Opt-Chip plastic or crystal?
how can you transfer your whole HD in under one second if you cannot read from it that fast?
(`._(`._( , , . JimmyPop[nL] . , , )_.)_.)
Umm, shine a laser at a point on a film of this stuff and you get a magnetic domain? Potentially change characteristics by frequency? Gee you could even roll this stuff up and squish it into something resembling a cerebrum..
Can anybody say FPGA real real fast?
Sounds like this kind of material is going to get engineered into gates and wires much sooner than semiconductor tech will get there.
Might give a new twist to the moniker "Flash Memory"..
Military must be shitting they let the cat out of the bag.
Even now, the last mile (ie the connection between you and your ISP) is the bottleneck in any connection. My ISP has several OC-3s and T1s, but am I getting any benefit from it? No, I'm using a fscking 56k modem! Even if every major city had several 100 Gb/sec lines between each other, giving that bandwidth to the customer is going to be a bitch (maybe wiring CAT5 into every room of every house, same as electricty and phone?).
ISSCC: Transceiver developers creep toward 40 Gbits
Source EETimes
A link is here
So, we are moving to faster networks....2002 is a date tied to shipping product for oc768 by someone in one of the articles I read.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Also, does the referred page load really crappy for anyone else using mozilla? ;)
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
http://cbc .ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/04/07/op tochip000407
Small article at the CBC website about said chip..
.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -
Scientific American magazine devoted a large article to just such a device ("Optical computer"). Don't know when exactly but it was in the early 1990's. Are there any Computer Engineer's in the house? BTW: this is my 1st post.
Damn what I could do with a 100 GB/s download speed. What are some of the things you'd do?
As with many technologies, especially that of communications related ones (which is most of them), the point of making advancements is so that they become so common place and so small and so fast that we no longer see it. It's just there, and is all around us. If you have such high bandwidth, you wouldn't be talking about "getting on the net". It would just be everywhere. We'd know it's there, but it'd be invisible because the networking hardware would be so small and the infrastructure so vast. We would not be aware of its speed, because everything would be instantaneous.
The speed quoted would require 40 Infiniband switched fabrics, plus 63 Ultra 160 SCSI striped disks with very fast cache memory, connected to each switched fabric to cope with this speed. For what purpose?
Depends if corporations achieve extraterritoriality like they did in the Shiawase decision... if that happens, we'll all get screwed... Basically, the MegaCorporate complexes were treated as separate countries and had their own set of laws, armies, etc. It came to the point where companies were stronger than any government.
I used to think that it would never happen, but with some of the recent issues...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Then things will progress from there... eventually you'll be plugging your head into the internet... and scenarios like Neuromancer/Shadowrun/Johnny Mnemonic start becoming a reality...
Okay, maybe this won't happen, but it would be damn cool if it did.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I do see a downside to neuo interfaces though.
You forgot the obvious one... get into a company's system, and your neighbors may be smelling burnt flesh coming from your house if you get caught...
I can see the MPAA/RIAA/Other acronyms loving this, though... their new technology will fry your brain if you try to copy it...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
How about 3.28 trillion bits per second down 300km of fibre? Wouldn't that be amazing?
http://www.vnunet.com/News/601094
Whoohoo, I can transfer my whole HD in like under a second now. If only I could get an Internet connection that fast now.
Or hear about someone like Enikia
or Compaq Intel Microsoft
or Notel (Canada)
or UK and others (Germany for example) are trying and setting up networks over power lines (X10 over power lines has been implemented for a while now)
It's nothing like the light transmitters but for home use it could be good, especially if you have no DSL or CABLE access. Electric cables are everywhere. The problem with electric power networks is only that unlike other forms of communication before electricity gets to your house it is transformed at many different nodes and sub-stations with analog transformers (thus it is problematic to send binary data on these lines) hopefully it'll be done everywhere anyway!
You can't handle the truth.
Radio waves are made up of photons, just as is visible light, microwaves, x-rays, infrared, etc. All are various wavelengths of the Electromagnetic Spectrum.
Of course, I have no idea how their spray-on doohickeys can intercept both visible and radio waves, but that's another discussion.
You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
This reminds of that Simpsons episode: "I invented a machine that downloads porn a million times faster!"
This
In order to even further enhance the speed, Lucent engineers worked day and night on a new process to make 8 times 1 equal to 10...
"The experimental GigaChannel Ethernet multiplexer combines up to eight independent gigabit Ethernet signals into a single 10 Gb/s signal stream."
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
High bandwidth, high latency: I take my 40 gig hard drive on my 10 minute drive home from work.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
It could be useful. So perhaps we won't need that sort of speed for a while. Its still cheap. Maybe even cheap enough to justify replacing short coax cables with fibre optics.
Incidentally, is there a way of producing data this quickly, even if its just random noise?
It's like how programs grow to fill the memory and speed capacity of a system.
But hey, 100GB/s over long distance fibre would be a really good thing for making lower bandwidth connections (like a tiny T3) cheaper... 'cause you could fit over 2000 T3 pipes through your 100GB/s pipe... that's good enough to make T3 a "home use" connection.
BlackNova Traders
As a Bible-believing Protestant Christian who relies solely on Jesus Christ for salvation and is currently studying Revelation (Whore of Babylon and all), I just have to ask...
...what does this have to do with the whole "Opti-chip" thing?
Even if this does become avaliable in the next year, who is going to even be able to take advantage of its power? The rest of the computer is going to be bottle necking the flow of information. I think it will be years before we see anything close to this kind of speed in a personal computer.... Just my thoughts.
"WWWWWAAAAZZZZZZAAAHHHHHHH?!?!!?"
-------------------------------------------------
Probably take a decade to get a good map of the brain and the activity 'code' so that you can reproduce sight (which they already have to some extent for blind 'lab rats') and have interaction via brain impulses alone. Add to that the time necessary to develop the nanites necessary to rig the connections (as any human, and probably most robots, would be to ham fisted to do that kind of work), and you have the hardware & firmware done.
I'm pretty sure the software side for the computer/deck will already be written by then, so I'll take bets that the technology for DNI will be viable in 25 years.
Am I the only one who thinks this is some shit? Current technology cant support that kind of speeds yet.
Having a retinal degenerative eye disease, I've read a lot of inforation, kept up on that information, and during the a test about 2 weeks ago, I talked to one of a leading reasearcher on my specific eye disease.
First of all, it's important to know how the eye works. Here is a bad diagram. (view as monospaced test)
|
(2 / |4
-1--> ( --- |*5
( \ |
3|
1 is light. 2 is the lense, 3 is the cornia 4 is the retina, and 5 is the optic nerve.
Light comes in to the eye, and is refracted by the lense to the retna. The retna is like a CCD in a camera. It translates light in to nerve impulses. then it goes along the optic nerve to the brain to be translated to mesages like "Hey! I'm reading slashdot!" Where the optic nerve is on the retina, you have a blind spot. Take a pen with a funny colored cap. close your left eye, and move it around you field of vision low in the middle to the left a little, and you'll find it. The cornia keeps the fluid in your eye in your eye, and germs out.
The most common Retinal degenerative eye disease is Mascular Degeneration. (Especially Age related MD) Another diseas (that I have) is Retenitus Pigmentosa. Generally the diseases (these two do, there are others that don't) work by killing patches of your retina. RP for example starts by killing the outer cells in your eye (the ones responsible for parapheral vision and dark vision) then the disease works it's way in. MD works by killing the central cells in your eye which are responsible for hi-res, high-light situations (like reading a slashdot artical.) A lot of blindness is caused by eye diseases like those. Those would be the most treatable with this technology.
Here are the problems:
- Just like electronics(implants) your body is likely to reject it.
- The modified/nonmodified organic cells may not be able to run off of blood.
- Even if the first two are solved, blood stops flowing to the blind areas in an eye.
- the nerves also die in the blind part of the eye.
- How do you properly emulate nerve impulses.
- One would need to compensate for the light seeing and dark seeing parts of the retina called rods and cones.
- Probibly others I can't think of.
The good news is that some of these technologies are being reasearched. Hopefuly this will be another step to making the implants work.
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Man, I hope your right. Even since I was a zit faced teenager playing a decker in shadowrun I've been dreaming of this. Here I come Matrix!
I do see a downside to neuo interfaces though. Remember chippies and the BTL chips in shadowrun? I can see some asswhole actually designing a new drug-chip that stimulates the pleasure centers in your brain directly. After you've done that...screw crack.
Imagine what will happen to my pr0n collection.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
um.. ANTI-christian?? how that anti-christian?? if anything it just goes to prove how prevalent Christianity is in our society. It would make not sence to compare it to something no one's heard of. maybe i just misunderstood the comment... but either way boy did we get off topic.
- "yes but can you hit someone over the head with a rolled up internet?" -Foxtrot
The exercise isn't totally pointless. Imagine picking out a significant number of major metroplexes (call them Class I connections) in the continental United States, and then running 128Tb connections between them with no intervening branching. Reducing the number of hops from Los Angeles to New York, for example, to two (or maybe even one) would reduce a lot of side traffic, freeing up bandwidth and improving the efficiency of connections. From each of these primary hubs could extend a few 16Tb or 32Tb connections (call these Class II connections) to other significant population/data centers, providing robust, high speed connections at a lower cost.
As a rather extreme example, I was playing a game of Q2:CTF once, and wanted to see why the connection seemed flaky. Running a tracert, I found that I was going through 23 hops, roughly from Los Angeles to San Jose to Chicago to New York to Washington to Florida to Dallas, where the server was located. With a better backbone architecture, that could have been reduced to maybe six hops -- rouhgly from my ISP to LA to Dallas to server. (Excess hops in the same location were left out of both of those examples.)
A few ideas of locations that could be interconnected with 128Tb connections:
Seattle
San Francisco Bay
Los Angeles
Denver
Los Alamos
Chicago
Dallas
New York
Boston
Washington, D.C.
Atlanta
Miami
Boston is kind of questionable for that one, and it may be better suited for a Class II connection. Other cities, such as San Diego or Houston, could get Class II connections from their closest Class I connection point.
This architecture would provide for alternate routing (each Class I would link with three or more Class I locations, as each Class II would link with two or more Class II locations in addition to the Class I source) in case of disaster or other disruption. The only barrier to this is the costs associated with building and running a dozen or so Class I connection sites, plus the dozens of Class II sites, plus all of the F-O that would have to be run.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
DWDM (Dense Wave-Dimension Multiplexing) has been tested at speeds much faster than for the WAN. I do not have any references handy, but a carrier was advertising multiplexing 32 colors of DWDM in the WAN, and Lincoln Labs has tested 200+ colors of DWDM. In these cases, each color was a single SONET OC-192 link. For the existing 32 color system that is 320 gigabits/sec for a single network link! The basic idea is that the signal is spread out into several channels that are different wavelengths of light on the fiber, or 'colors'. One color is reserved for control information. One of the current stumbling blocks of DWDM is that most fiber repeaters in existing networks were not designed to propogate multiple wavelengths, just signal strength, so they will muddy things up after a few wavelengths are used. This is not a huge problem in the US, but is a big problem when one considers the cost of replacing repeaters in undersea cables. An intersting thing about DWDM is that each color can carry a different protocol - for instance you can have a couple colors of Packet over SONET, and a couple of ATM over SONET. There is also talk of running IP directly over DWDM, but an intermediate protocol needs to be developed to handle some of the layer 1 functionality of SONET that DWDM itself does not take care of. Lincoln Labs and Lucent are both doing a lot of work in this area.
Unfortunately it is not fiber optics that you need to build an optical computer but optical switches. Just as you don't build an electronic computer from wires but as you said from transistors. The vital property of a transistor is that the voltage it produces at its output(s) depend upon the input voltages. This allows the the building of logic circuits which are the basis of computer chips.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
I wonder what kind of heat that thing generates.... (I guess I should try reading the article first, huh???)
BTW, you "First Post" guys are really lame... you should close your web-browser and go back to playing Barbie's Dream House...
Tiger, don't come down on Biblical doctrine until you've given yourself a chance to actually find out what it says. The AC answering you isn't contradicting himself, he's just not able to explain himself to someone who's hasn't been exposed to the majority of Christian theology. Paul said in Romans "it is by grace you have been saved...not by works so that no one can bost." But I believe it was Peter (don't quote me on that) that said "without works, faith is dead." and also that the tree that does not bear good fruit will be trimmed and cast into the fire. What the apostles are saying is that all sin can be forgiven, but if you accept Christ, and allow the Spirit to work in your life, you should desire to not sin. It doesn't say your absolved from all responsiblity, but rather if you're repentent (very important point in the teachings) your sins can be forgiven. If you would like further discourse about this, you can email me at birchler@umr.edu. I won't preach, or try to convert you, or even try to convince you. I will try to answer any questions you might have though. later homey.
Why are you so hostile? In this great psuedo-socialist country we call America, he has just as much right to speak his opinion as you do. And for you information, there are a number of very fine physicists, chemists, and IT professionals that are also Christians. Just because they are not usually the most vocal in a given group doesn't mean they don't exist. And what do you draw your broad, hateful conclusions based on? You probably know nothing of the majority of Christian (not Catholic, not Mormon) theology. People are so disdainful of that which they do not know. I'll be away from my computer over the weekend, so if you'd like to flaim me the address would be: birchler@umr.edu
This is great. Think of the real uses for this?
The broadband internet that Canada is creating for educational systems can take advantage of this and high quality video conferencing, sending videos back and forth between locations, backups to a centralized server, or any other number of things.
Sure, most computers probably can't use it right now -- but could the first spaceship get into space either?
I Like those odds, imagine miliseconds and a report could write itself from your thoughts, no fumbling for the words, all the statistics would be displayed on your document (can you tell I'm a student?)
"Out the 100Base-T port, through the router, off the bridge, past the firewall..... Nothing but Net."
A hard drive can't transfer at any where near that speed, so what's the use? Unless you run and store everything in the RAM, but I don't know, is that even possible? Is so much faster than physical storage to be worth it? About the only use I can think of for it is in dumb terminals, and who wants those?! --Baelmix
--Baelmix
In the article, it stated that the material was an organic substance good at handling optical signals. Well, if the device is supposed to modulate satellite signals to electronic signals, where does the usefulness of the organic substance come in? I guess its equally adept with electronic and optical signals? You can see I'm a bit confused, please help!
Check out my website on privacy and security issues: http://www.idmaweb.com/.
Of course, this leaves the problem that different materials can only accept certain wavelengths of electromagnetic energy. I suppose that's the strength of this organic material -- that it can accept a wide range of wavelengths?
Lower and higher do have meaning in terms of scale; however, accepting that longer wavelengths are at the 'bottom' of the spectrum, you could refer to them as lower wavelengths (i.e. lower than the higher wavelengths)
In any event, yes, I was refering to shorter and longer wavelengths and the ability of the material to handle a large spectrum.
So if it's going to be cheap enough to spray on a car and possibly create an anti-collision system. How long will it take before the hackers will be able to hack into my car and make it burst into flames.
This is just another case of technology jut for the sake of technology
Also, since I can't even get DSL where I live, and this technology is supposed to be out by 2005, does this mean I will finally get DSL in 2005?
Will my new X-Box use this great technology, oh wait, I have to buy the proprietary MS-ETH/OPT-CHP conversion cable. Maybe I'll just hack my I-Opener and hook this thing on to the back as well.
Hammer of Truth
I can see some asswhole actually designing a new drug-chip that stimulates the pleasure centers in your brain directly.
which reminds me maybe i should go ahead and register downloadheroin.com
As far as the Matrix goes...
user has quit brain(connection reset by peer)
Hammer of Truth
Err.. yes of course but my Agp Max Bandwith is 4 GB/s an my HD max is 66 MB /s Of COurse This is Theorical So How are the real Numbers?
Can this stuff be sprayed on eyes? Maybe with some sort of opto-neuro connectors, this can cure blindness or provide another means of _absorbing_ information.
This appears to be a wonderful thing: the ability to translate huge quantities of data from light to electricity. But what do you use it for? I readily admit to being in the learning phase of high technology, so I'm not sure what the application would be. The article mentioned using this stuff to fab processors. But how do you manage gates and traces? When it comes time to go from the CPU to the rest of the mobo, are you going to make all the other components of the same material (both for speed purposes and for compatibility)?
.10 micron? .05 micron?
"Spray on" ?? <Image src="Aerosol.Can"> - Multiple layers? How would they talk to each other? I got the idea that it was a series of connected 'nodes', not pipes, so how would the 'node size' compare to a regualr fab process?
Or am I standing too close to the trees? Perhaps a new Lucent or Cisco über-router would use this stuff to better manage/move traffic on the large backbones? It isn't like you can make a transatlantic cable of this stuff, is it? What of a LAN using fibre-optic NICs? How would it be useful in that situation?
What kinds of applications might the USAF be looking to apply it in? RADAR? Again, I thought they were radio waves, not light waves. What would this material emit or receive? Perhaps on large enough munitions (a Tomohawk?), you could improve the passive guidance systems by enabling them to react faster? Will I/O systems start having trouble keeping pace?
Is it flexible? How durable is it? I read of the 'wearable' computer. Could this material help further that concept and make it viable? Or perhaps make a peice of functionality small enough that one could finally produce those high-tech mirrorshades?
I voted for Bandwidth a couple weeks ago. Now we see this amazing claim. Please, enlighten me.
CB
Argh! Typo again! I've got to cut down on the jellybeans. Try: this link.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The number of routers you'd need to network up every household at this speed would be phenominal, as each chassis has only a very limited number of connections. On the other hand, if you built a national backbone from these, say at 128 Tbits (not unreasonable - 32-64 fibres would not be expensive, and enough routers to load-balance and direct the data would not be inordinate), then built metropoliton networks for each town and city, at the 2-3 Tbit level (again, well within the capacity of these devices and well within what could be sensibly installed, run and maintained), and finally ran 1 Gigabit lines to each house, you could have a genuine broadband network.
(As a totally pointless exercise, I sketched out, for myself, a crude network map, based on this design, and costed it. The numbers look like a Windows serial number, but that's probably still pocket-money for Bill Gates.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There IS a way to get the full potential of this device, using existing PC technology.
It'd be great for 4-way C&C, or 20-way Netrek. (Who plays Quake anyway? :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As I understand them, the docs say route. Try this link, instead. (Why they couldn't use Apache, with the spelling check on, I don't know. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
From a quick look at the technical specs, it is routing IP packets (unlike so-called wavelength routers, which just switch DWDM wavelengths). They talk about doing WFQ (Weighted Fair Queuing) etc.
r .html) which is being implemented in Linux, BSD (via AltQ), Windows 2000, and most routers.
All in all, this is a pretty impressive box - other boxes from Juniper and Cisco are already available but don't scale so high. For a good article on the benchmarketing involved in terabit routers, see http://www.lightreading.com/, which also has a great piece on how to succeed in an optical networking startup ('at all costs, stop your engineers from developing a product'...)
Access lists are not very relevant on core routers - all use of access lists, e.g. for multiple-field classification (IP addresses, port numbers, IP Protocol, URL, etc.) should be done on the edge of the network, where the available CPU power per Mbps is much higher. This is part of the standard DiffServ model (details at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/diffserv-charte
The idea of DiffServ is that the edge routers do the hard classification, then encode this in the packet in the TOS byte in a 6-bit number called the DiffServ codepoint. From that point, all routers just have to check the TOS byte to see which queue to use for a packet, which is pretty fast and much easier to do in hardware. Linux has pretty good DiffServ support - see the Advanced Routing HOWTO for details, or the article in Linux Journal this month.
- It mentions that the substance can be "painted on". How would it be applied to create the type of etched patterns required for a microprocessor, ram chip, etc.?
- Digital applications require on/off transistors. Does the fact that the substance has a really fast transmission rate mean anything in an of itself, or is there another fundamental discovery (how to make a transistor out of it) required?
- What about bleed over/cross talk?
- Switching speed?
As you can see, I'm limited in my knowledge of anything but the basic electronics, but that's where everything starts. So I invite y'all to fill in the blanks, so I can sit back and learn from the commentary....Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Does anyone else remember this article from a year ago about the first "photonic circuits" being developed by a company called Nanovation? The link to the story in that article is dead, but I found another one. Ever since then, I've been pondering how to get around the hideous bottleneck that modern memory is, and the only solution I've arrived at is to make an optical RAM equivalent based on similar technology. The only problem is that, I haven't been able to figure out a way of connecting it to the CPU without basically including it as an unupgradeable L2 or L3 cache with normal slow memory beyond it.
Now, however, we have a device capable of nicely interfacing with an optical cable for 100 GB/sec speeds. This may be the interface we need for making "slots" for upgradable optical RAM. Cool! I can't wait to get to move to fully optical computers. This is the technology of the future. I just hope that the people creating these technologies will be willing to license their patents out to other companies.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This is hilarious. I just read the first 5 posts on this article. All ACs, all score 0, but all good posts. What is wrong with the moderators? Why are these posts at the same level as the grits guy? Read at -1 moderators! In my opinion it signals a big problem that the /. moderation system wasn't designed to handle. Now that /. was a much larger readerbase, not everyone will be a member, and not everyone will bother to make an account. Also with the hidiously increasing number of trolls, moderators are increasingly moving to reading at 1 or above. That leaves out a lot of ACs who have a good point, but either don't want to bother to create an account, or have an unpopular viewpoint and don't want to endanger their account. I suggest that the moderation system be changed to something so you can browse based on what it was moderated to, not just the score. So people you could browse by insightful, or AC, and ignore the troll or flamebait posts. This would also require moderator to more activly moderate down the trolls, but they are more willing to do that than moderate up the ACs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
100 GB/s periphs are not useless in todays market. Just because your rusted-out Pacer can't handle the Autobahn doesn't mean it can't cruise along at 55. Say the bus could techically handle 400 MB/s. That's still three times faster than the realized throughput from a pair of Yellowfin Gig Ether, and ten times as useful!! A 100 GB/s limit is like money in the bank!!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Recently there was a web design contest that had a very interesting constraint. All entries had to be less than 5K, with no server side help (Note: The contest is closed now). There were over 1,000 entries and it really generated a lot of buzz. Many egos are at stake here! The FAQ indicates that there were five DHTML recreations of Space Invaders, four versions of Simon, and six 3d Maze games! All less than 5K. People can do more with less.
The reason I mention this is that file size, download time, and bandwidth are critically important to all kinds of people. The contest I mention reflects a kind interesting return to the basics. What can you do with as little as possible? People of all types, from programmers to artists to system admins, actually want to do more with less, but they don't for a number of reasons. Argh!
Perhaps the internet pipes that companies are building are less necessary than we are being told. Certainly the need would decrease if we could remove layer after layer of bloat.
While some applications need the power, many don't. More and more features don't necessarily mean you're getting a better application. Quite the opposite is often true.
Theory: More bandwidth is being requested because too people are lazy or because executives are too stupid to facilitate good coding and project management. The average geek certainly doesn't want to be lazy; the average geek is detail oriented and they want to kick ass. Small, useful applications are beatiful things. In any event, I wonder how much a pipe most people really would need to have if we were all able to be more effecient from day to day.
John S. Rhodes
Usability and a whole lot more...
http://webword.com
How to Download YouTube Videos
Gods - just imagine if you could actually get EXERCISE moving through those multiplayer RPG worlds, or perhaps playing those virtual fighting martial arts games. You'd have entire generations of Conans & Bruce Lees, who might have never left their house!
As people have pointed out in previous threads, actually backing up modern disk capacities is a nightmare; my current machine has over 50 Gb of storage, and there's no consumer backup media that can realistically cope with that sort of capacity in any reasonable timeframe.
Remote mounting an encrypted partition on a remote server could work quite nicely. In fact, with the sort of bandwidth that's being quoted here, you could quite happily boot off it, although the access times could be a pain.
I'm still sceptical about the claim that this is more bandwidth than we can use, though; internet users have proven themselves to have an almost limitless capacity for pornography, and streaming DVDs would eat a lot of network... :)
I'm a little spaced out due to tremendous studying, which is coincidentally on a topic similar to this. My question is, "Didn't they basically just make fast, efficient transducer?" If the answer to that is, "Yeah", then we really don't have that much to get excited about.
There's still the ultimate problem of increasing the speed of electrical processing. We've got optical routers, so this new material would basically just be used once the data is ready to be processed. And then it's back to transistor sizing, copper traces, barrier tunneling, and all that wicked stuff that nobody is ready to solve.
Wow that's pretty slick. Unlike all the other people who've posted so far, I'm not going to complain about not being able to use this bandwith, instead I'm going to reflect on the sheer amount of porn that one could download it. I mean with ethernet I, I mean someone, has the leg up on 90% of the us population, but with this EVERyBODY could get their porn. New age of democracy is what I'd call it. It gets my thumbs up.
One other thing, I am AMAZED that the porn industry doesn't sponspor more internet technology, according to my statistics 90% of the bandwith is used for this purpose alone. If only we could get like porn only aisles through the internet.
sweetness.
-dennis the kid.
And you have a system that can keep up with the byte firehose...
Then we would finally have the bandwidth required to push enough information down the pipe to a system to create a true, functional, VRML interface. Get some gloves and a vision rig, munge up some software to do the data to image translation (which is being worked on for the Internet2 project) and let the games begin!
Who'd care about flatscreen monitors then? Would carple tunnel be a thing of the past? Would it make information overload a true psychological problem? You decide!
The article stated that the device would be useful as a modulator converting signals from fiber optic cables or satellites. Aren't these two completely different problems? Satellite signals would need modulation through an antenna, and optical fiber signals would need modulation through an optical input.
Does this logically mean that the chip has 3 input/outputs? And can switch effortlessly between any 3? What physical form would a modulator like this take?
Also, the material can be sprayed on, but what method do they then use to etch circuits? Are there any scientists out there who can answer these questions?
PS, please check out my new Privacy and Security forum at http://www.idmaweb.com.
Busses need to be wider, not just faster. Considering that the adaptation of 32 bit computing was hampered for years by a prevalent operating system manufacturer, it seems GNU/Linux may finally come into it's own as hardware architectures diverge from x86 standards. Given that 64bit processor support has been shoehorned into Linux for quite awhile now, Linux stands in an excellent position to foster competing cpu architectures, as opposed to differing brand names essentially presenting the same product. Bring on the cheap 64 and 128 bit processors, Linux can be compiled to adapt. Whats more, single chip multi-processors may be a little down the road. We seem to be at the threshold of a GNU era for hardware nerds. -Gary
I'll preface my remarks by saying that I haven't read the Science article and the ZDnet article seems pretty short on scientific details. That said, this is one of my research topics, so I know a little bit about the area.
First off, I've seen some questions about the quote of "spraying" onto a chip. There are a variety of techniques, but I'm guessing they're talking about spin-coating or CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition), which are both used routinely in manufacturing.
Secondly, these electro-optic devices use "second order nonlinear optics" (for all you physics geeks). Basically, people have been using crystalline modulators like lithium niobate for years, but they're very expensive and hard to make. So most of the research in the area has gone into making organic/polymer/self-assembled modulators. The idea is that you encase your chromophore molecule (the "active ingredient") in a polymer or other strong-film environment. Then you use this film in a waveguide and use it like a switch. The best mental picture would be a railroad switch--the electrical signal switches optical tracks for the optical beam.
Without reading the published results, it's hard to know if this is really a breakthrough. My questions would be whether it's actually a new chromophore that's giving better results, a better preparation method, or something else. It sounds like they're making some change to the preparation of polymer devices, which are behind the self-assembled films many labs are making now.
Suffice to say, the *real* revolution will come if anyone can get a usable third order NLO device. This would allow optical-optical switching.
-Geoff
Stupid question time - what is the maximum switching frequency of a plain old phototransistor?
Exotic technologies are very neat, but I'm wondering if more conventional technologies might already work.
If phototransistor switching speed is comparable to ordinary transistor switching speed, you could probably build an optical transciever more cheaply by using closely packed frequency channels with bandwidth comparable to the switching speed, and a prism or diffraction grating to split them for parallel reading.
"The experimental GigaChannel Ethernet multiplexer combines up to eight independent gigabit Ethernet signals into a single 10 Gb/s signal
stream."
It sounds dopey, but it actually makes sense - what they are saying is that they can fit 8 Gigabit ethernet channels into a single OC-192 carrier (OC-192 is an industry standard, ~10Gbps SONET optical data rate) They can't fit 10, because there is overhead in any SONET stream, and they'd need extra overhead to split out the 1Gbps channels from one another. It seems like they ought to be able to fit 9 channels in there, if they really wanted to.
A thought just occurred to me - they may not be TDM muxing the 8 signals at all, but rather they are saying that they can cram 8 1Gbps carrier signals into the same frequency range that would normally carry a single OC-192 carrier. This would make it easier (read: cheaper) to split out one channel to drop it out at it's destination without having to have expensive 10Gbps/1Gbps mux hardware at each terminus, and it is consistent with them needing to have guard bands [dead frequencies between the carriers so one signal doesn't stomp on the one next door] between the 8 carriers. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this must be what they are doing - the other way would be *way* too expensive.
So, loopy as it sounds, fitting 8 Gigabit Ethernet channels into the 'space' of a 10Gbps optical channel makes perfect sense when taken in context.
I hate it when people talk about discovering more bandwidth that we can use ( or process ). When has this _ever_ been a problem in our history. My immediate reaction to this is that if the MPAA were to read that article, they'd be needlessly ultra paranoid about DeCSS. I say this because you and I will NOT be able to practically download entire DVD's any time soon. In order for us to have 100G / s bandwidth right now with that technology, it would have to be an isolated point to point network. Which means that you will probably be very familiar with the other end of the connection. The fear of DVD copying usually involves complete access to the entire web and a random end point for transmittion. The statistical likelihood of a desired DVD being on your other end are rather slim.
Another use for this 100G network would be in an office situation but again, unless you've got a point to point star network, you're multiplexing someone's data which will reduce your bandwidth ( to well within a computer's processing capability ). Still, it's a hell of a lot more than what we have now.. But again, live video feeds are from static, known points ( mainly within your building, or between a finite number of known buildings ).
So then, let's apply this technology to general publicly available internet connections. What do we have.. Raw bandwidth that will be soaking up by Linux distribution downloads, pr0n and general web-site traffic. Meaning if you put more bandwidth up, then the population will increase the volume of it's downloads to fill it. It's a basic trend that I'd be hard pressed to not call fact. And lets put this into perspective.. These 100G connections out on the internet are hardly going to be noticed over the existing high bandwidth lines where the routers are the slow point. Yes you can put high perf routers, and yes you'll eventually be able to maximally traffic this data, but your 56K modem or 1Mps cable network is not going to take advantage of it. And I'm doubting that we'll see home connections any time soon. Buisnesses that can afford such a connection are probably going to be saturating it. This is because it's probably not going to be cheap, and a business doesn't usually indulge in a technology for economic efficiency reasons.
Will this help? Of course. Will it be great? Hell yeah. Will you realize any benifit? No. Because it's like a savings account interest rate when there's inflation. You may be getting 10% interest in your savings account, but if inflation is 15%, that doesn't get you anything more tomorrow than you have today ( you'll just be hurting less than if you only got 2% interest ).
The biggest threat I see to the internet is video feeds ( hence my focus in this article ). If the public sees high bandwidth, they typically chant video, which, in my mind, if it ever comes to fruition then imagine the effect of thousands of homes leaving their internet TV connection on all night ( like we do our internet radio here at work ). This is just a rant, but it reflects my current paranoia about public bandwidth.
-Michael
-Michael
Now now now, don't forget yourself. If you realy wanted to increase bandwidth, on a board, you'd either need fiber chanels or massively wide busses. Both of which are rather expensive, not just for the motherboard, but for the periferal manufacturers. The whole driving force in the PC industry has been supply and demand. IBM pushed MCA back in the 386 days ( absolutely better than ISA ( and probably even better than EISA ) ), but obviously the world didn't stampeed to this technology ( just like they don't stampeed to Alpha's apparent superiority, even though they can technically still run the same programs ). Granted IBM was proprietary. But the point is that the PC industry _can't_ just supe up their systems, because that costs money, and S & D requires an equilibrium for profit maximization ( and in the PC world, that just about breaks you even ).
There's also the case of compatibility. Even if you could produce as superior device in both performance _and_ price, you run the risk of lack of compatibility and thus you can only play a nitch and thus S&D kills you again.
The reason the PC industry has been technologically advancing so quickly is because there has been competition for maximally compatible components that simply run faster. ( Plus a segmented market with some willing to pay premium, and a large majority demanding the cheapest ). If we didn't have that diverse market, we'd still be running a 486 class machine today. ( And Alpha's wouldn't be windows 3.5 compatible )
-Michael
-Michael
- more pins (# bits/clock)
- higher clock rates (greater bits/time)
- move the bus on chip meaning you can't just plug in a new card
The first two mean more power - power being (very) roughly proportional to the number of pins and how fast they are waggling - and as a result hotter chips. The more pins solution breaks down pretty fast - you can double the bandwidth by doubling the bus width only so many times before running into packaging problems - remember at high frequencies you need 1 power/ground pin for every 3-4 signal pins - also plug-in card with >64 data pins are probably impractical Bumping the clock rate while keeping the bus narrow seems to be the way some parts of the industry's going (1394, RamBus, the new fast USB etc).For most of the PC space the third option is probably going to be what you see - more integration - buses going away or being pushed on-chip meaning that the chances for plug-in high bandwidth goodies are virtually non-existant - instead you get what was chosen for you by the person who chose the chip when they put the motherboard together.
Anyway the thing to remember TANSTAAFL - everything is a compromise.
... download a Jon Katz article without having to go for a cup of tea?
But seriously, this sounds like a great technology, and one needed to implement the "Internet of the Future", whatever that may be, put it is only one technology out of a host which are required. Sure, in the short term this will give rise to improvements in data transmission, but until a series of other breakthroughs are made this won't reveal its true potential.
So yeah, 100Gb/second is possible, but not for quite a while yet.
Some of the cool stuff some researchers are doing is integrating a laser onto a normal ASIC....
[...]
Now all we need is a way of producing RAM and peripherals that keep match with the speed....
For the RAM, at least, the answer is straightforward. Keep latency at its current range, but _heavily_ interleave RAM both on a bank level and a chip level. You now have RAM that can get 100 cache row requests and service all of them with a batch latency of 7 ns (or 5 ns or [etc]).
This would let you, say, put 8 or 16 cores on a die without worrying about cache misses slowing you down (as long as you have a deep miss buffer).
This would also be useful for transferring vast amounts of data with good locality in a known pattern (for instance, triangle or texture data) from RAM to a peripheral.
This is probably what busses will look like in a decade or two, as it's much easier to eliminate cross-talk and interference on an optical bus than on an electrical one.
Here is a research that is done at Lucent Technologies:
Instead of switching from optical wave to an electrical charge they use optical repeaters with mirrors and optical amplifiers.
"The DWDM-ready GigaChannel has been demonstrated over 40 kilometers of standard single-mode fiber using WaveStar MetroPoint and also over Lucent's flagship long-reach product, the Wavestar OLS 400G, using multiple 80-kilometer fiber spans with online erbium-doped optical amplifiers and dispersion compensation."
However it's only 10GB/s. Maybe they'll learn to do better than that.
"The experimental GigaChannel Ethernet multiplexer combines up to eight independent gigabit Ethernet signals into a single 10 Gb/s signal stream, enabling switches, routers and servers to connect at 10 Gb/s in native Ethernet format without the need for protocol conversion. The prototype complies with today's IEEE Gigabit Ethernet standard."
You can't handle the truth.
IO performance has always been a problem with PC's. We've had PC's around for how long... and all we have to show for it is AGP 4X????
While CPU horsepower has been following Moore's law pretty well, the PC world has lagged behind in terms of bus bandwidth. "100GB/sec" peripherals are useless when your bus runs at 133Mhz.
Let's start pushing chipset and memory manufacturers to start putting out faster busses and memory subsystems, and then PC's will finally begin to approach supercomputer-level performance.
________________________________
Terabit and faster networking isn't totally cutting edge anymore. Lucent is talking about sending many terabits per second over a single fiber.
What is interesting is the ability to process packets at that speed. This chip is critical in converting that optical stream into an electronic stream. The other part is a CPU or multi-CPU architecture to process the data. I'm sure Cisco is very interested in this.
So with Lucent figuring out how to send multiple terabits per second over a single fiber, this company able to convert those signals into electronic form, and hopefully soon Cisco being able to process and route data at those speeds, we'll soon be able to forget about bandwidth issues on the Internet. Or to be more precise, the bandwidth issues will become almost entirely limited to the link between consumers and their ISPs.