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Fiber On Your Motherboard...Soon!
km790816 writes: "In this post I joked about wanting an optical bus on my PC. In the last week I've seen two articles from The Register and EETimes discussing the real possibility. Both mention high bandwidth and lower heat and power usage. Sounds good to me."
We could see a new generation of energy-efficient computers, since less energy is wasted as heat with this technology.
Let's hope we do not have to wait till the 5 GHz crossover, as mentioned in the EE Times article.
Maybe once we can get cheap solid-state drives, it will be all speedy goodness inside our boxes.
"Never pet a burning dog."
But even hard drives are getting obsolete. Granted, no viable commercial alternatives exist right now (primarily because the consumers aren't demanding them right now), but the technology already exists for low-latency, high-bandwidth data storage and retrieval. Personally, I'm looking forward to crystal storage. Transfer speeds 1000 times current values and the ability to store 200+ gigs in a cubic centimeter of space...it beats the hell out of DVDs or other optical devices. And because there's no rotating platter(s), the seek time is only a fraction of what you have for conventional spin-based storage (i.e. CDs, DVDs, hard drives).
Of course, we won't see any of this stuff on the consumer market until there's a reasonable demand for it. Guess I'll be counting the days.
So, in a totally optical computer, how are they going to solve the problem of extension cards ? if the optical signals are converted back to electric signals so people can connects daughterboards, I assume it would defeat the purpose. If the optical signals are kept optical, are they going to invent some kind of optical connector to pass it across the "bus" ? I can't see people doing what those BT guys did in our office.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Maybe this is an intermediary step.. instead of trying to do everything with light we'll start with the component connectors and go from there.
Having several high-bandwidth optical links to the CPU would definatly speed things up, but there will always be another bottleneck to deal with.... I'd be more concerned with the optical/digital conversion process that would have to take place every time a new signal is sent. Wouldnt that be a lot of overhead?
And don't forget the new Serial ATA standard that's supposed to greatly speed up the transfer speeds for hard drives... still another way of using good old metal connectors.
I'm not picky, I'll take any system performance enhancements I can get.
It is important to note that this is really about fiber, not fibre. So it really is about optics, not the fibre channel storage interface.
For reference, fibre channel is a high end storage interconnect which is replacing SCSI in corporate data centers. While fibre channel was designed with optical transport in mind, it also runs over copper. While I would not be surprised to hear about high-end server motherboards with fibre channel on the motherboard (instead of IDE or SCSI), that would be a far less interesting story than having actual optical transmission on the motherboard.
Cool.
My friend Henry Morgan at ElectroCon has been working on such optics for more than a year. I'm not sure exactly what he's doing but he has told me that they have normal hard drives connected over fiber.
It seems to be just proof-of-concept, as I expect the IDE (or SCSI?) protocol and existing controller would be a bottleneck to increased performance. He also hasn't mentioned if anyone has been interested in buying the technology - that is for sure the kind of thing he couldn't tell me.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
The idea is that subsystems could communicate within a computer chassis entirely by light across open space or reflected off of the interior of the chassis. Instead of the complex process of wiring hundreds of chip leads down into packaging all of the data would be sent off and on the chip by tiny lasers & receivers, all built into the chip itself during fabrication. Through a window on the chip case and the CPU could "see" the RAM controller, perhaps even the RAM directly, the graphics controller, the high-speed IO subsystems, etc.
Card edge connectors would still be used for electrical supply and some signaling but it'd be relegated to slow-speed stuff. This would greatly simplify motherboard design as well as chip packaging. Of course this would come with it's own problem: Dust would be a showstopper. Reflections - their propagation and interference properties would become issues. The signaling systems might require an uneconomical transistor count on the chips. Overclockers would obsess about albedo and air filters.
I'm trying to find some good links for this but not finding any - anyone else come across any good discussion on this recently?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The problem with this is that ever single component on the motherboard that uses the bus will need a redesign in order to communicate over a fiber bus. It's something that definitely can and will be done, but it's not going to be "soon." It also won't be cheap. Why do you think they keep making new RAM that's not backwards compatible? Becuase the old stuff is almost as good and is dirt cheap. When they start making fiber ready hard drives and such, they are going to charge an arm and a leg. One positive: the normal stuff will then go dirt cheap, but they'll probably stop makign it after a few months or so.
~ now you know
Oh please, that old canard about intelligence spontaniously arising out of sufficient processing power.
Throwing hardware at AI hasn't resulted in any fundamental breakthroughs and it isn't likely to. Oh it makes things happen more in scale with us and enables a lot larger cycle budget for increasingly lower-yield strategies but it's really just more of the same.
Self-organizing systems and emergent complexity happen due to underlying architecture. Life has had billons of years and the best incentive possible to evolve this - we're only now beginning to understand the subject.
Assembling a computer with the speed and density of a human brain won't mean it'll suddenly magically become self-aware, open it's IO and and engage us in conversation.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'm sure I've seen this discussed before and that a number of problems exist with an optical bus in a non-optical system.
Firstly, the length of the bus on a motherboard is so short that there are few real gains over a copper/gold track, and those gains that are made are outweighed by the encoders/decoders that do the photonelectron conversions.
Also, it would probably put the cost of add-in cards up since the row of gold contacts has to be replaced with something far more sophistocated.
Also, one of the problems with existing bandwidth to the memory is not only the speed, but also the bus width. Unfortunately a wider bus gives more bandwidth (assumming that data lines are added, and not address), but also means more pins on the chip, which costs more.
In a pure optical system, it maybe possible to eliminate all these problems, but I'm not convinced from what I have read that it is a solution for todays computers...
-- Mike
Am I the only one here who thinks optical fibre on the motherboard is a waste? ...thats right EXTRA heat, from the light sources, and for every connection beween 2 points you need 2 light sources. I don't get how this is supposed to help heat problems.
Think of the cost of fibres and lasers/leds.
Think of the EXTRA heat it would create.
Couldn't we find more efficient ways of doing things?
I'm not sure that it is a troll. I can definately see the uses for this. Load everything except your data into the ramdisk. Granted, moving the mp3's off the drive and onto the ethernet might be a pain, but I imagine that loading of shared libraries, etc. would go pretty damned quick. Ditto for spawned processes.
Now, in a large environment, 4GB likely wouldn't be enough for the RAM that the programs use as well as a usable RAMdisk, but for the home environment, it could work.
Problem with that is that the benefits would probably be least in that environment. But, it would eliminate my concern about yanking the power cord accidentally, or the CA brown/blackouts you alluded to. OTOOH (on the other other hand) Does replaying the journal (you are using a journaling fs, aren't you?) take any less time than loading up the RAM disk in the first place? Probably not. But, if you are still on ext2, it makes sense. Put / on RAM. Then, even though loading the RAMdisk would be a long time, it wouldn't be much longer than fsck, but you don't have to worry about a hosed disk. (But, again... If you have 4GB of RAM, you are probably savvy enough to have ext3, Reiser, etc.)
I don't know. I give up. It's a valid question, but I don't think it's a troll. But the answer is most definately, 100% "it depends".
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I just thought of something.
:)
Perhaps having a fiber-optic bus will allow for a more modular motherboard design, where the CPU socket, memory slots, PCI/AGP slots, etc. are individual components connected to a central northbridge/southbridge via fiber cable?
Since motherboard manufacturers have to choose a particular memory/CPU/PCI slot design, purchasing a motherboard can be limiting to the consumer (at least the hardware enthusiast). By splitting all motherboard sub-components up, you'd be able to pair whatever CPU to whatever memory type you want, and have a PCI module that lets you tack on as many PCI/ISA as you need. Literally a custom-built motherboard.
I'm sure this is slightly costlier, as far as an initial sunk cost, but upgrades should be easier. To make your investment go even further, things like the northbridge module should be a flashable module, so you can update it to support some new processor or memory module type (buy a software upgrade instead of replace the central hardware module).
Okay, so perhaps this is a little far-fetched, and perhaps gone on a very bad tangent from what the original intention of fiber-optic motherboards. But I can still dream, can't I?
I think you're nuts. High motherboard and I/O speeds are exactly what's needed. With reasonably fast (by today's standards) mobos based on the SiS735 available at ~$60 street, I don't see why we need cheaper mobos. Fiber interconnects to main memory (provided they keep the latency down!) could make a real difference. Imagine if main memory behaved more like cache. I'd be willing to pay more for that, at least for a database and compute servers.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo