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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.
Actually, I'd prefer motherboards with NO pci slots. Upgrading to a faster bus would be a good idea.
I'm running up against the bus-bandwidth problem just about every day.
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.)
Yes, they are the same. I took a class many years ago and half the course was on audio and the other half was video. We went through the rigourous math etc. The most interesting potential application I remember was that a 2D FFT of an image could be used for pattern matching. You take the FFT of the image and correlate it with an FFT of the image you want to match. The de-correlated output result had highlighted "points" whose brightness corresponded to the "goodness" of the match.
It was really very cool. One image was a bunch of letters on a page, arranged randomly. The thing we were matching was the letter 'h'. The brightest points in the result were indeed the letters 'h' on the page. Some 'n's also correlated to a degree and they also showed up in the result, although they were not as bright as the 'h's. Most fascinating - it didn't matter what rotation the individual letters had. An upside-down 'h' or a 90-degree rotated 'h' were equally recognized. If anything, this optical processing is probably purer than current digital methods which are only approximations.