Slashdot Mirror
New Optical DSPs With Tera-ops Performance
GFD writes: "The EETimes has a story about a new class of hybrid digital/optical signal processors that are programmable and offer tera-ops performance potential for relatively low cost and power requirements. No fundamental breakthroughs but rather a very slick use of existing optical networking components to create a programmable optical processor that looks to the rest of the world like a single chip digital signal processor. Elegant and impressive if they can deliver."
This should help in advancing IP Telephony and Video. Be prepared for, not only, integrated messaging, but IP video conferencing telephones, and more interactive IVR systems, voice mail and OS's.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Very slick! I wonder how this bodes for future MB chipset designs.
When you see what companies like nVidia are doing with chipsets like the nForce (i.e.: better then mediocre on-board graphics, very capable on-board audio, Ethernet etc, etc...) we may start seeing motherboards with surplus PCI slots.
My bad, 468 not 486. Damn numerical dislexia.
Who wants Pork Chops?
I'm not sure that an optical transform is the same as a digital transform, or that they can be used to do the same thing. Can their optical FFT/digital encoding produce the same bits during JPEG encoding as a digital FFT/digital encoding JPEG encoder? This is crucial for image/video compression algorithms.
since they are not actually processing the signal digitally. They are slickly converting it to a light signal, doing the heavy lifting with optical elements, which is essentially analog processing, and then converting it back to a digital signal. A real valuable short cut for those applications where you can translate what needs to be done to optical elements, but not anything like a general-purpose tera-ops digital computer.
Basically, for those of you too impatient to read the article, it works by using VSCELs (lasers) through conventional optics, and into a high-speed collector. The lasers can work at up to 1 Ghz, and the processing is done (it seems) in analog by the optics. Acquisition of the date is performed by the collector, which operates at 10 Ghz.
The theory is that optics can perform FFTs, DCTs, etc for you at the speed of light, and there are many applications that need these operatons done. Any other processing, correlation, etc would be done by conventional, low-performance DSPs.
They also say that their current model works at 20 T ops/sec at 20 watts, and list what would be required of typical DSPs, etc down to ASICS.
Seems promising, but it is still a long way away from a nice optical CPU.
only if companies start to use 'dark fibers'... which I doubt will happen in the present state of the economy...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
IMHO, the optical aspects are a red herring. The real speed advantage comes from going analog, which has always been (and always will be) much faster than digital. This gets rediscovered every few years, and then lost when the harsh limits on analog accuracy become more bothersome at the same time as the speed of digital is creeping upwards.
-- MarkusQ
This is the kind of thing that might be able to break 128 bit encryption in months rather than years, so sell your RSA stock.
Actually, they are VCSELs (Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers) and are made from semiconductors. The reason it matters is that the edge emitting variety, which were first developed, would be nearly impossible to mount effectively. That is the main advantage of the VCSEL, its ability to be bonded to PCBs or other substrates.
Just a FYI.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
I always lightens my heart to see technology march onward like this. Hella cool beans.
If we were to abandon PCI, what would you have us use? PCI is fast enough for mosth things, actually does a decent P&P, and is cheap.
Reboot macht Frei.
Peter Guilfoyle had almost the same optical technology twenty years ago, albeit slower, but a couple orders of magnitude faster than the silicon of the day. The military had been using these for decades for analog image processing, but Guilfoyle integrated a digital protocol.
During the early 1980s Guilfoyle attempted to commercialize this device, but failed. Engineers designed a computer around it, but realized it was more economic and reliable to implement it in silicon ASICs (custom gate arrays) than as an optical processor. The venture capitalists sided with the engineers and kicked Guilfoyle out. The company was named "Saxpy" after the name of fundamental matrix primitive used in array processors of era. A couple of prototypes were built, but never really sold.
The 1980s were the golden age of the custom supercomputers and there were dozens built and died by the 1990s. Custom super computers could not keep up with the economics of commodity clusters (Beuwolfs). Custom machines took 3-5 years to develop a new generation, whereas commodity CPUs became 10-100 times faster & cheaper during the same time span. The only way for sustom computers to keep ahead of commodity computers is to be at least 10,000 times faster than commodity computers to avoid the catch-up problem.
(I bought supers in the 1980s and Saxpy was on the vendors list.)
Must .... resist .... urge ..... AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
Run/Duck/Hide
No fundamental breakthroughs but rather a very slick use of existing....
No fundamental breakthroughs. Then, Quick! Better patent it!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
I remember a friend of mine telling me about a siggraph demo in which you played a fighting game by punching, kicking, and so on. It used a holographic system to recognize your moves - Nothing more than a hologram - Which changed the signals sent to the computer running the game.
I wonder if you might be able to do something clever with programmable optical computing that involved holograms as switches, more or less an optical FPGA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"