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Fiber On Your Motherboard...Soon!

Posted by timothy on from the let-there-be-fiber dept.

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."

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Optical on the motherboard.. by ldopa1 · · Score: 3, Offtopic

    This would put SCSI on the skids. Right now SCSI is the only really fast interface commonly available between devices, but it's cost has kept it from becoming the standard. But if you could just plug in a fiber connection, you'd be rocking. Another thought is that fiber network cards wouldn't be far away. It'd be cool to buy a LinkSys Fiberboard at CompUSA for 30 bucks and be able to network all of your computers in house that way. Of course wireless technology is already pushing the limit farther.

    Also, Time magazine reported last year about this, and they pointed out that the kind of speed offered by fiber is the only real bottleneck to creating a truly self aware computer. They also mentioned that MIT was working on a Laser circuit, where logic is figured out by the paths of a laser moving through space.

    The only real application of this at the current time is in device to device communications. We'd have to rework all silicon chips to use the new protocols.

    Another problem is that we'd still have the silicon-to-light translation bottleneck. i.e. and electrical signal from a pin on a chip needs to be converted to laserlight somehow. To make this truly work, you'd need a chip that reponds via light, and I haven't seen any IC's that communicate via light yet. Of course, I doubt that they are very far around the corner.

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    The Dopester
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    1. Re:Optical on the motherboard.. by Muad'Dave · · Score: 2, Offtopic


      An already-existing attempt at fiber interconnect is called "Fibre Channel". It is fast, and can be hubbed/switched like ethernet. In fact, you can run TCP/IP over Fibre Channel. It is expensive, but you can have very long loops running very fast without EMI (electromagnetic interference). Here's a link to the industry group's technical overview.

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  2. Re:Not too far off by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    Dude, SCSI already runs over fiber (fibre). The SCSI-3 spec for SCSI-FCP is for Fibre Channel.

    Fibre Channel runs at 1Gbit serial FDX (for 2Gb throughput) and 2Gbit adapters are available. They are also looking at 10Gbit technology.

    Most really high end storage uses fibre channel.

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    Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.