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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.
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 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.