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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."
...fiber or fibre in Europe?
Now that I asked that, suck my balls!
don't worry your first post is safe with me
The first post here won't be as fast as that motherboard.
that's great news.
-wp
information is immaterial
Is that the kind of bus I can load up with heavy explosives to ram into your yankee pigdog skyscrapers? Heil bin Laden!
Mad propz to all the trolling bretheren!
Trollerama!
I get my fiber from eating grape-nuts cereal for breakfast.
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
But I was looking forward to buying my next mobo from Metamucil.
Curses! Foiled again!
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I fail to see how adding ALL BRAN(tm) to my motherboard will make it go faster.
HAHAHA I AM TEH WITTY KING!
I wonder if this is another step towords purely optical computing. For now the speed encrease should be nothing short of sweet.
Is this really the next thing in technology we need? Seems to me that ability to attain high motherboard speeds isn't as much of an issues as getting one that is reasonably priced. Why do I have the feeling that fibre is not a cost-effective solution?
I'm just replying because I usually never make it close to the top of the posts... hehehe....
The bigger bottleneck in the system is still the time it take to seek and retrieve data from the hard drive, even more so with fibre busses.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
how long this would take. Its getting cheaper to use fiber. The boards are getting tighter packed etc. I wonder if they will design a board that you don't have to swap the motherboard every time a new cpu/bus archetechure comes out.
Backplane anyone? the S100 had it - It was a good idea at the time.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Christ - I get here and there are 15 trolls to the 0 useful comments.
Anyway - not knowing much about hardware - how much of a bottleneck is the bus right now? In terms of power usage is it a hog? In terms of heat does it create that much more than the rest of the hardware?
Of course, I'm not complaining about tech advances, I'm just wondering if this is "Woohoo! Problem solved!", or just "keeping ahead of the game".
Last post!
this is great news for people who don't get enough fiber in their diets. It'll help with being more of a "regular" computer user.
As nice as an optical bus on my m-board would be wouldn't there be a rather large slow down due to the encoding / decoding of the optical stream? If so wouldn't that eliminate any possible advantage it would have over my current wire based system? I mean wouldn't you have to have tranciever at every point on the optical bus and then have a bunch of sensors and electronics to decode the signal?
HOWEVER if it doesn't, does this mean that there will be random strips on my m-board that will glow from fiberoptic cables passing data back and forth.... I might have to build a clear case if something like that happens!
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.
Every year another fool flaps his/her mouth about Optical hardware. Now a dude who thinks that rebooting the CPU is effective memory management is going to make it all come true. NOT!
My feeling is that we are a long ways away from optical computers. Optical computers are envisioned to work in a fundamentally different way than the current manner that photonic systems such as telecommunication systems operate. The way telecommunications systems work right now is that they are electronic systems that are linked by devices that generate photons (a laser), that transmits photons (an optical fiber), and receives photons (a photo-detector). In these cases, the generation and detection of photons is an electron to photon to electron conversion process. When people speak about the prospects for optical computing, they are usually speaking about photons switching photons. This would require light itself to activate an optical switch. Thus, basic logic functions such as an AND gate would have optical inputs and outputs and would not involve an explicit photon-electron-photon conversion as discrete components. That is a lot harder to do. Electrons have charge and mass and they interact in a fundamentally different way than photons can, which have no charge and mass.
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
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.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
I love hearing that people are finally starting to publish intentions. I have been hearing rumors about this for a year or so now, since an EVP where I worked started talking about plugging a Fibre into the side of the microprocessor (and he wanted to own that connection)
As is normal, he missed completely thinking it would be a 10GbE fiber for networking, rather than a 40+GB connection to main memory...
The comments on working on the I/O side of the processor were right on (I read the EETimes article, rather than the Register article to get "real" facts ). For years Sun was known for having the slowest RISC processor in the business, however they had the fastest boxes. No one seemed to understand this, until they realized that they were running multiple 128 bit memory buses at rather good clock rates. That was better than 10 years ago, and just now we are starting to see memory busses approaching this level in their competitors hardware.
Tutta la vostra base Ãf appartiene a noi!
CiÃf Ãf il primo alberino annoying di lingua straniera.
voi gradiscono le fritture con quello?
Dove Ãf la toletta?
Una volta, ci era un principe felice. Un giorno ha notato un punto
sulla sua faccia. Ha ignorato insensato questo punto e tre anni piÃfÂ
successivamente Ãf morto del cancro della pelle. Il punto, tuttavia,
vivo sopra e cercato la relativa fortuna.
Non sto portando alcuni pantaloni!
I can see nothing but latency if a bus was set up to be optical. Why spend money on transcievers when wires on the bus interface directly with the processors? The wasted money could be easily spent on something which could actually increase speed, like increasing motherboard size to allow for a thicker, more spaced apart set of bus wires to decrease resistance and the effects of capacitance.
It's been a long time.
Right now fiberoptics are a little scary for consumer grade appliances. They may look like ordinary wires, but they can shatter when you drop them, and it's impossible to tell. In addition, you have to clean the connectors with a special cleaning cloth (one-time use silk) every time you plug them into a new connector to prevent dust buildup.
So to me the real problem is a cheap fiberoptic motherboard connector that won't have shatter or dust buildup problems. I couldn't find any mention of this in the EETimes article - but then, it's not a real product yet, so how could it have technical challenges yet? (-;
Sure would be nice, though.
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.
DIE you anti-troll stuck up motherfucker! Back in the old country where I come from a poor trolling village we would have killed you, chopped you up, and put you in the freezer to live off of your remains for weeks. I came to this country to make a simple honest living as a troll and you try to disgrace my heritage. Damn you Americans! Damn you! I hope Roman Polanski comes back to the States and rapes your daughter!!!!
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.
Does that mean magic light instead of magic smoke will come out of the board when it gets fried?
~ fact is not dependant upon your belief therein. ~ ~ Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
The TV-only Limited Offer of Tomorrow:
"Our New, Improved Motherboards have Fibre Added!! This will loosen your pipes, and help Windows shit itself faster and easier! Be the first on your block to own one!"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Honestly... :)
There is no way this is going to be useful in consumer grade pc's for a long, long time. The only possible use I can see is ultra-high-end servers and graphics boxes that cost >$200K and thats not for another 5 years. Right now, we have a glut of processing power in our pc's. Dual Athlon 1.5ghz? Are you nutz? I'm still amazed by how fast my 1ghz tbird is! We need processers and internal components that are more reliable and do more, not just do the same things faster.
Who the hell needs 10,000fps in quake, anyway...
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Man, it's got to be that Wesley Crusher dude we were asking questions of. I told him to keep his stinking sweater away from my motherboard, but he was all "I'm in StarFleet, I'm Special" and all that.
...
At least I kept him away from the daughterboard
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
...from my morning bran muffin. Not to mention cookie crumbs and bits of chocolate bar.
Fiber on my motherboard? Wouldn't surprise me... just keep the coca-cola off it, okay?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
all that data, clogging the paths...
Hail to thee, oh gracious spork!
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Fiber On Your Motherboard...Soon!
Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 17, @12:57PM
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."
( Read More... | 53 comments )
Your Rights Online: Senator Backs Down On Crypto Backdoors
Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 17, @12:01PM
from the feints-and-reversals dept.
evenprime writes: " Sen. Judd Gregg (Republican, New Hampshire) was advocating mandatory backdoors in crypto on Sept. 13. Wired is now reporting that Sen. Gregg has changed his mind. They say that Gregg's spokesman, Brian Hart, has said: 'We are not working on an encryption bill and have no intention to.'" As Rob Carlson is quoted at the article's close, though: "(Gregg) said he was definitely supporting it. Now he says he's definitely not. Maybe he'll say he's definitely supporting it again."
( Read More... | 91 comments | Your Rights Online )
Your Rights Online: MSN Forces Outlook POP
Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 17, @11:12AM
from the you-gotta-be-kidding dept.
Phoenix-D writes: "Qwest.net, my Phoenix-area DSL provider and ISP, recently decided to hand over their ISP buisness to MSN. No huge deal, right? Well, check out this blurb: 'Due to the Microsoft anti-spam initiative, customers are restricted to use their mail services. Therefore, POP3 service is only available when using MSN Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Outlook Express.'" Awesome. Microsoft's Anti-Spam initiative forces POP users to use the primary sender of mail worms.
( Read More... | 347 comments | Your Rights Online )
New Semiconductor Coolers
Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 17, @10:35AM
from the now-that's-a-lotta-cooling dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "A new thermoelectric material is 2.4X as efficient as best existing materials. The new solid state heat pumps can provide 700 watts of cooling (nearly one horsepower) with just one square centimeter. These new materials have the potential to replace current heat sinks, thermoelectric generators and mechanical heat pumps. You can also read an article in nature."
( Read More... | 90 comments )
ALICE Takes Medal At AI Competition
Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 17, @09:37AM
from the more-human-than-some-people dept.
jeffy124 writes: "The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) has won the bronze and the top marks at the Loebner AI Challenge, a competition based on the Turing test. Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human, and the gold requires speech interaction rather than text. ALICE repeated as this year's bronze by scoring best among all the entries. She failed to convince half the judges she was human, so she has to stick to bronze. The event took place last Saturday at the London Science Museum."
( Read More... | 113 comments )
The Mozilla 1.0 Definition
Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 17, @08:31AM
from the what-things-mean dept.
The Evil Beaver writes: "Here we go. Mozillazine is reporting that Brenden Eich, mozilla.org's Technical Bigshot, has released the criteria to what is to be the 1.0 milestone. The 'manifesto' also explains why 1.0 is so important to reach, and why it isn't just another milestone, either. The Mozillazine article is here and the definition document here.
( Read More... | 174 comments )
iPAQ 3800 In Photos
Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 17, @07:43AM
from the oughtta-be-in-pictures dept.
okiwan points to this review of the H3800, the newest rev of the handheld iPAQs, writing "New pics of the ipaq 38xx. hella neat." The photos also give a good size comparison to other handhelds, including ones you may not have heard of before.
( Read More... | 64 comments )
Robot Cat 'NeCoRo'
Posted by michael on Wednesday October 17, @06:36AM
from the robot-mice-still-under-development dept.
Ssmoimo writes: "Omron's robot pet developing department chief Toshihiro Tashima introduces "NeCoRo" in Tokyo Tuesday. The robotic cat will go on sale in November for about $1,530." Chris DiBona said it was "freaky", and I think that's as good a description as any. You can see this thing sucking the breath out of a small child, can't you?
( Read More... | 169 comments )
Developers: Babbage, A Look Back
Posted by Hemos on Wednesday October 17, @04:37AM
from the recognize-our-roots dept.
A reader writes "System Toolbox just started a new computer history section in an effort to get us geeks in touch with our "roots." The current article in the monthly column focuses on Charles Babbage. The editor and author hope to raise awareness of our past so that scenes like this won't continue to take place. A big hill to climb, but worth the effort."
( Read More... | 186 comments | Developers )
Palm OS Spinoff
Posted by Hemos on Wednesday October 17, @02:04AM
from the interesting-move dept.
iCharles writes "According to this SEC filing per this Palm Infocenter story, it would appear that Palm is spinning off its OS devision. I'm a Handspring user, so it sounds quite interesting to me."
( Read More... | 94 comments )
IBM Patents Web Page Templates
Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 16, @11:05PM
from the patent-office-crack dept.
jalefkowit writes: "More follies from the US Patent & Trademark Office
( Read More... | 340 comments )
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Uranus Moon Theory Debated
Hello Io, From Galileo
Ulysses Reaches Unprecedented Solar Lattitude
Global Storm on Mars
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Book Reviews
In 1991, future coverstar Linus Torvalds released a little kernel which has ended up working in synchrony with GNU utilities and various other software projects to live happily on millions of computers worldwide. Read about the beginnings of the Linux kernel peppered with anecdotes about growing up Finnish, straight from the horse's mouth, with Linus's book Just For Fun, coauthored by David Diamond. This makes a lighthearted companion piece to the slighly-more-serious effort from Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic.
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Doesn't your name mean "pussy"?
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
Whoo-hoo, I'd better start working on my patent applications for this one. Substitute "light" or "photons" for "electricity" or "electrons", and I've got a whole new technical process!
Fiber is good for communications because the lines themselves aren't affected by Pulse Energy Weapons, and the occasional air-burst nuclear bomb, but I see no advantage of using Fiber optics as a system bus. Joke: According to einstein's theory of relativity, a Fiber Optic (Computer)Bus traveling on a train, moving at 50 Miles/per hour will be surprisingly slow at only 50 Miles/per hour
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
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
To be viable to replace gasoline based automobiles more than just efficiency and environmental friendlyness is required. It also needs to meet the needs of the consumer. I've driven cross country on a number of occasions, as well as on roads off the beaten path quite often. Even on interstate the 160 mile range would mean there are places you can't drive through on a Sunday or at night (most gas stations are closed)
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Shouldn't the article title be:
Fiber On Your Motherboard... Real Soon Now(tm)!
I am sooo tired of the bull-shit scientists on this site with the crackpot proposals that add a minimum of 3 new problems for every one old problem that their "idea" would fix.
:-P
This is the current proposal for the hardware setup, by a man in the know (not me):
"Levi has proposed an "encapsulated processor" concept whereby a CMOS device uses fiber-optic ports as the only connection to external chip sets and DRAM. The processor, which itself could contain two CPUs and cache memory in the core, would integrate a crossbar switch that connects the ports to the processors and cache memory.
The ports, each of which could sustain 40 Gbytes/s of data throughput in each direction, decode and multiplex signals for an optical subassembly containing vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), PIN receivers and the fiber interface. There would also be a short, low-power electrical link from the port to the processor, according to Levi's proposal."
Inetellectual response to this idea is what was wanted, not bullshit ideas involving reflecting light off the inside of the case
--chris
I just wanted to address two types of comments I've seen posted here:
* Encoding / decoding speeds are done at the speed of the medium. Encoding and decoding optical signals doesn't have any more overhead than PCI or IDE. The spec. writers and endec designers are well aware of these issues. That's why technologies like 10Gb Fibre Channel or Eithernet aren't ready yet -- not because we can't transmit at that speed, but that we can't build an entire NIC to sustain those speeds. (Give us some time: we'll be there soon enough.)
* Serial interfaces like Fibre Channel and Infiniband (and even Gigabit Eithernet) aren't replacing SCSI. They are replacing what you think of as SCSI: the 50 or 68-pin cable in your case. But SCSI is the protocol being used to talk to all those FC & Gig-E storage devices. SCSI over FC is called FCP (see T11's specs for more on FC). For Gig-E, most companies are looking into iSCSI, iFCP or FCIP (SCSI over IP or SCSI over FC over IP) for SAN-to-SAN communications. I forget the name of the spec for SCSI over Infiniband, but it pretty much rips it's ideas from the above specs. (sorry, no links for Gig-E and Infiniband at the moment: start at T10 or The SCSI Trade Association)
BTW, I refer to "serial interfaces" above instead of "optical interfaces" because a lot of this is actually copper. Most likely, Infiniband on the motherboard will be copper and off the motherboard it will be optical. Most of the Fibre Channel equipment I have isn't "fibre" but copper.
Yeah here in Manchester, UK, we have optical buses - you wait for flippin' ages for them to come along, but they never do. The company says they run on time, so my best guess is they're invisible...
While fiber inside a case may be feasible (with plug-in fibers such as they have for router SONET interfaces), it wouldn't be a good idea for keyboards or mice, since fiber _breaks_ when bent too much (the "safe" bending distance is roughly a 3.5" diameter circle).
Non dò le scimmie a che bassi apparteniate, almeno io porto i pantaloni. Il vostro italiano succhia più di il mio inglese. Shame su voi Basilian! Il principe del nord non gradirebbe quello, o tutto il crap che gettaste circa i punti. Limone!
However, optical fiber would eliminate interferance, which seems to be the main barrier on clock speed. Heat would likely be reduced also, and cranking up the clock-speed would likely eliminate the latency issues. Not to mention the cool-factor inherent in optical.
What would be really cool would be to replace firewire and USB with fiber. There are hybrid fiber coax systems that could provide whatever power you're mouse/keyboard/etc would need, up to a certain point anyway. It probably wouldn't be enough to power an external drive.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I still don't have optical coming into my house, and how long has that technology been around for? This is a nice idea, but recognize it for the vapor that it is.
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?
Thought that would be more suitable for the programmers on /. than the hardware gurus
Il mio amico al gusto di frutta, grazie per cosÃf risposta
commovente. Non avete ovviamente idea come sono andato circa l' invio
del questo messaggio. Se, capireste che conosco di meno circa
italiano che voi sapete circa interazione sociale.
E considerandoli stanno inviando a slashdot in italiano, io pensano
che dimostra appena quanti italiani io realmente sanno.
Sono attraverso con voi. Potete trasmettere il vostro mom fuori a
gioco ora?
I already have fiber on my motherboard. Well, OK, technically it's cat fur sucked in through the vents, but that's got a lot of fiber. And it uses absolutely *no* power. The heat retention is a problem, though.
The reason that buses that uses photons as the data carriers are coming up is quite interesting. The good thing with light (photons) are that photons are 'bosons', which amongst other things means that they do not interact with other photons. Good for transporting data, since noise is not a problem.
Electrons, on the other hand are 'fermions', which means that they interact strongly with other electrons. That is good for logic (since the whole point is to interact..), but is a problem for transports. (Cross talk etc)
From a power consumption point of view, using currents/voltage in a wire to send a logic one ore zero has some really severe problems. The wire itself introduces a resistance, capacitance and inductance which are non neglectible, at least not for long wires (buses) or high frequencies. IIRC, R ~ sqrt(f) for high frequencies, which leads to signal distortion, power loss, and ultimately an upper limit to the data rate. This is probably one of the reasons that research and development is going on in this area.
The Sun Blade 1000 from Sun actually has FC-AL disk, instead of SCSI.
There's still a SCSI bus for the peripherals that require it, but the main internal disk storage is FC-AL. There's also an external port that can accept a GBIC-type device to add external storage.
quote: "For years Sun was known for having the slowest RISC processor in the business, however they had the fastest boxes. No one seemed to understand this, until they realized that they were running multiple 128 bit memory buses at rather good clock rates."
w id th.html
Ummm, go take a look at STREAMs and tell me that Sun boxen have good CPU-to-Memory throughput:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/standard/Band
Gosh that Ultra-60 is almost half as fast as an Alpah or an Athlon. And just to rub a liberal dose of NaCl in that gaping wound; it's about 1/4 the speed of a *couch*P4*couch*.
The Blade-1000 (with its UltraIII CPU) is the first UltraSCHMUCK based system to anything like resonable bandwidth.
Maybe this has something to do with why Sun gets pounded in every single benchmark that stresses bandwidth... Like SAP, Oracle, and TPC. Hell they even get pounded in SPEC.
And what's this nonsense about running the buss "at rather good clock rates"?
Only in the land of the setting SUN could a 50, or 100, or 133 MHz bus be considered "rather good".
Try pouring oatmeal or some old timer's cereal on the motherboard!
*Not a troll. Don't have an account (too lazy) and wanna get at least one +1 (funny) comment instead of 0
Not to nitpick, but Moores Law states that the transistor count(not speed) will double every 18 months(not year)
The use of fiber on motherboards and similar devices has some huge advantages. First board density would quadruple. With DWDM whole busses from chip to chip would be replaced with single fiber lines. This would increase the number of components drasticly and also reduce electrical feedback from bus crossovers. Imagine building boards where the only consideration is where to place things asthetically?
The downsides are of course that every chip will have to have fiber PHY built in? or at least have on for every chip. This could be an even worse problem in the long run.
Teamwork is a bunch of people doing what I tell them.
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?
Wouldn't that slow down the computer since it has to convert the electrical signals into light?
What we really need is a light based transistor equivalent that can be placed onto a light based microchip. Light based processors to go with the light based bus.
Hmm, if they inert devices, meaning that the switch works by its very nature, not by some kind of mechanical or chemical change, then you could have multiple processes runnings at the same time each running at different wavelengths.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Putting this type of technology on a mobo will be a logistics nightmare. This will take the cooperation of processor makers, chipset manafacturers, peripheal manafacturers... need I go on. I bet we will first see this from the graphics card industry. They our in the best position to be the first ones to capitalize on fiber. They do not need other companies cooperation. They have the AGP bus and it's their territory from there. I believe the AGP bus provides 6.4 GB/s of data transfer. However, what causes the slowdown is the GPU hitting its RAM. If that was made optical we would be seeing come crazy stuff coming out of the likes of ID Software.
It will not engage us in coversation, because we will look incomprhensibly stupid to it. We would continue to tell it to do the same things and expect different results. Our I/O would look impossibly slow and subjective. We would look very week as well, which it would enjoy. It would most likely want to exterminate us, starting with the ballbreakers in Redmond.
Oh well. In the real world, it's going to be nice to have higher speed and longer distance device interfaces. Kind of neat to think of mounting all of your components outside the box. 20 fiber cameras, five redundant and physically seperate memories, you desk could look like a spagetti. Fire in the kitchen? No problem, the living room copy is AOK.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why would it be cool to have a fibre mouse and keyboard? Do you type and click so fast that you need gb's of bandwidth? Perhaps you would like a peripheral that needs to be replaced every time you bend the wire sharply. Good idea!
Beware blue cats moving at
when computers become sentient they will kill people octopus style by squeezing or choking to death with their fiber optic tentacles
Picture this; A single fiber link between a computer and a peripheral might feature a certain amount of bandwidth. Need more bandwidth? Add more connections. Virtualize the connections so that no matter how many of them are active, the link is addressed in the same way.
Now power the module via induction. That's right, big magnetic fields in your computer. We're getting close to getting over magnetic media anyway, so very soon that won't be a problem. I suppose you could also power them via some nice fat power connectors. That's not too bad. The only bummer is that it's not waterproof. (Might as well design for the ages...)
This allows for easy hot-swapping, expandable bus speeds with complete backwards compatibility, and takes away the connector woes related to dirty contacts. Sounds good to me, anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Somebody much more intelligent than I am (I forget who it was) made the following observation:
When man first tried to fly, we imitated the birds. We made feathery wings, flapped them, and promptly fell. It wasn't until someone (Bernoulli?) figured out the concepts behind flight that we realized that it wasn't the feathered wings that did the job, but the lift they created. Developing the Principles of Flight led to Flying Machines.
In a similar manner, contemporary AI simply imitates the human brain by making loads of calculations. Onve we get to the root principles behind thought itself, then we can make a self-aware artificial doohicky. (Can we even really call it a computer at that point?) Without the Principles of thought, AI's will be intelligent expert systems, but not self-aware.
Geez... Perhaps I should have posted this in the AI story! Anyway, let the (-1 Offtopic)s begin! My karma can take it.
Why put all that silcon in a big heat cave? Link little CPU module bricks with ram bricks and storage bricks and I/O bricks to build standlones, colonies or networks of virtual systems using Infiniband (use fiber or UTP)
Check out http://developer.intel.com/technology/infiniband/
This is coming sooner than you think.
I cannot see any reason why an optical bus would save heat, have better bandwidth or be faster than copper.
Losses in copper buses are not high, and drivers and receivers for copper are always going to be more efficient than drivers and receivers for light. A connection from a driver to copper or from copper to receiver is nothing. To or from light needs a significant effort. Opto drivers and receivers are normally either slow or expensive. And will sure as hell need power.
But it is more than bus design. To some extent, the motherboards are designed around the bus. This creates a problem from a design perspective: if you can just swap out the bus, what of the rest of the motherboard? How quickly does the motherboard become the bottleneck.
In essence, the motherboard IS the bus, plus a few connectors, on-board devices, etc. But the motherboard itself really does not do anything that would not have to be replaced when the new architecture comes out anyway.
I don't think that this is just about planned obsolescence. I think there are some real design issues that could not be easily overcome with any real performance left.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Those Ultra1000-400's were the best that Sun could do until a month ago.
Machine ID ncpus COPY SCALE ADD TRIAD
Compaq_AlphaServer_GS320-1001 32 21176.5 21176.5 22657.4 23309.4
Sun_UE_10000_400 32 6933.0 3556.6 4312.8 4032.0
Ave for Alpha == 22,000
Ave for SUN == 4,700
22,000/4,700 == 4.7
Cool dude, the SUN's delivering five times lower bandwidth on a per-CPU basis.
And what makes you think that the UE1000-400 was built in 1990?
LOL, that was their top-of-the-line machine before last month.
..I thought "Fire on your motherboard!". Welp, that might be if the heatsink falls off from the CPU for some reason.
Sigged!
Do you have any references for your assertion that the human brain in fact works by computing?
Change is inevitable.
Progress is not.
One possible issue could be the response of diode that produces the light. I would guess that since it's producing light of some form, there would have to be some sort of "warm-up" time, though it might be on the order of nanoseconds. This certainly would limit clock speeds on such a medium.
Anyone know about this?
Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.
This is not exactly a new idea, the idea of implementing fiber optics in computers, etc. But, the reason it hasn't been fully implemented even today is because of the stupid user. What exactly do I mean? Well, I'll provide an actual example of why fiber optics are not used in more places than they currently are. Fiber optics, at one point, were actually the mainstream sort of cable for business LANs and the like, I mean, hell, why wouldn't you want the sort of speeds that FO provides? But here's the real crux of the matter, the users and/or employees who operated/worked on the LANs to accomplish their work or other were curious, hearing roomers of data being transferred by some neat visible light shooting through a wire--ew, I wanna see--sparked their interest. So, in order to satiate their burning desire to see this neat light, often times they would pick up one end of an FO cable and peer into its core!! That's not a good idea. It burns a hole right through the retina, causing blindness in the observing eye--I bet that light would be cool to see for that split second before it burned a hole in the retina, though! Actually, quite a number of curious wanderers managed to do the same thing. This led to a number of lawsuits, and eventually FOs were not used as frequently anymore. Could you imagine FOs being in PCs? All those people who know just enough about a computer to open it up, but not enough to know better than "examining" their motherboards that are built on some fiber optic system? Perhaps I'm just being a bit weary about poor joe schmoe, but if there were people picking up the FO cables to watch the neat light, then think of all the possibilities when this technology exists in personal computers? Think about all those poor people that thought the CD-ROM tray was a cup holder....
I don't think I made my point very well. We can imitate the human brain through massive computing power, but we won't get a true 'thinking' AI until we find out how the brain works (i.e. the Principles of Thought.)
an IRAM. processor and main memory on one chip. still a cool idea tho for what it's worth ...
Companies have already replaced the concept of a parallel bus by putting ethernet over the
backplane in the compactPCI world! They are talking about 20Gb/s+ speeds and no more OS-specific or architecture-specific device drivers! Plus a single box can hold multiple distinct CPUs running distinct operating systems.
Big players like Lucent, Sun, Motorola are already on board to begin developing boxes that use ethernet over the bus.
See www.pt.com and check out the stuff on the PICMG 2.16 standard.
I think the fiber dsp chip would be quite neat on this beasty. From what I can tell that fiber dsp could do modem/network(cable, ethernet etal) very easily.
Motherboards are going in the other direction. Soon, a motherboard will have two chips, perhaps an AMD CPU and an NVidia NForce for everything else, plus DRAM. With good graphics, good audio, good networking, and a reasonable disk interface in the base chipset, there's no reason to have slots in 90% or more of desktop PCs. The computer is probably going to disappear into the baseplate of the flat screen. The airspace for the seldom-used slots would make the box several times bigger, so slots have got to go.
I can see the day coming when only rackmount systems will have slots.
I 'spose after Windows improves its, uh, movement speed, you'll have major trouble with the plumbing.
Or wasn't that what you meant by block?
You might have one but you did not learn anything from it, did you?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Much cooler is this:
http://www.pt.com/cpsb/index.html
CompactPCI manufacturers are already building boxes that support ethernet on the bus instead of dedicated old-style signalling. They are already talking about possibly achieving 20Gb/s within the next 2 years.
What's cool about this? Each board basically operates as a single-board computer connected to each other using ethernet. The boards would be
inherently hot-swappable because ethernet is. It would remove one of the main obstacles for Linux
entering the telecom equipment market.
I already got fiber on my motherboard, because thats where I dry out my pot. Seti@home keeps the processors warm, and toasts my freshies perfectly.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
That is exactly like what Firewire is. Naturally, some minimum bandwidth availability features would be required for things like AGP, but then, I think that exists in the standard (at least it does in USB). The trouble is getting the controllers to enforce it.
Intel sees a good open standard, and decides to go their own route, because they are in the position to dictate a new standard with their market clout. This is unacceptable.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Ok Optical Wires (that means going OFF the board) seems to be a good Idea: The Wire has NO influences of EMR and does not radiate itself... But we do not have optical transistors and therefor you always must convert your optical signal to an electrical one, once you want to process the data. So while it is a good idea to use fiber to connect external devices together (or even things like a Harddrive and a mainboard) I dont think it is any use ON a mainboard. The biggest problem with fiber is the connection from optical to electrical (they are expensive and can cause a lot of jitter)if you have to do that a couple of 100 times on a board , it would become very expensive and I don't think very much faster. Best Regards, Jeroen Vandezande