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.

Comments

Ways of speeding up the RAM, at least.

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

Lucent

[roman_mir]

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."

Exemplifies the need for PC's to change

[Stiletto]

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.
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terabit networking

[crow]

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.