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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."
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?
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
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.
Maybe once we can get cheap solid-state drives, it will be all speedy goodness inside our boxes.
"Never pet a burning dog."
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."
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.
And our routers. I think this is better for optical networking (no conversion between optical and electrical) inside to make routing decisions. Now we just need a way to read the optical packets and manipulate them.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
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.
Of course it will have a 20 second "Slow Down, Cowboy!" timer. That's how long it will take to boot XP 2002. Linux will, of course, boot in .3 seconds on that motherboard.
t m
From the article: "But it may not take divine intervention to get more mileage out of copper interconnect. Intel claims it can reach speeds of 10 GHz and beyond in five to eight years using copper. "We're confident we can get to 10 GHz. And there's reason to believe we can double that," Pinfold said."
I'd put my money on copper; we're still using
gasoline, when hydrogen-powered cars have
been viable for years.
http://www.auto.com/industry/iwirn22_20010822.h
-wp
information is immaterial
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.
No, quit using HDs altogether.
You can get a motherboard with 4G of ram
these days. What do you need a hard drive
for?
Storage, only. Load it once, and off ya
go, fastern a bleeding spullet.
-wp
information is immaterial
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?
Right now the bus is one of the largest bottlenecks in the system.
problems for home use:
Video card
Buisness:
Networking
multiple controllers.
It's not that hard to saturate a bus and unfortunatly it happens a lot. There are several hackish ways companies are trying to fix that (multiple PCI busses AGP etc) but none really fix the underlying problem.
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?
...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.
While most folks are correct in that the biggest latency source is the drives right now, there is a fair bottleneck on the RAM to CPU bus. I think it's up around a 8:1 ratio right now (4:1 if you have a 266 MHz FSB), which means that your CPU can spend a large portion of its time waiting for data from memory.
:)
True, that's what the L1 and L2 cache are supposed to prevent, but some apps (games, mostly) blow through that cache without even thinking about it. WWIIOnline, for instance, gets bitchy with only 256MB. It's only happy once you have 512MB. How long will even a 4 MB on-die cache last?
If we can increase the speed that we can toss bits between the CPU and RAM, we'll reduce one more sticking point (and RDRAM, expensive as it is, was meant to do that), and higher framerates for all!
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.
What do you need a hard drive for?
This is a troll, right?
On the off chance that it's not...
Let's see... I want to keep more than 4GB of MP3s around. Oh, gee, I live in California -- hope the power doesn't go out for longer than my UPS lives! Etc... etc... etc...
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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
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
Well, that's fascinating; do you have any links that talk about specific "crystal storage" technology, or did you get this information from "Superman: The Movie" 8^)
Seriously, I'd like to find a way to store all of the world's information in a few crystal cubes in my pocket. Just the geek factor alone is enough to get me excited. I could solve any argument, for instance, by hooking the relevant cube up to my Palm and scratching out the appropriate question on the screen. I think that's a "reasonable demand"...
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
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.
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'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 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.
Someone, quick, moderate this either:
+1 Enteresting or
+1 Enformative
;-)
Didn't you read the post? Use the harddrive for storage, not for virtual ram. Or, put another way, instead of reading 128 kb of the MP3, and whilst playing that bit, reading the next bit, just read the whole thing into ram and play it. That takes the hard drive's seek time right out of the equasion, assuming you defrag often enough. And at that point, I'm surprised nobody sells a 5.25 inch form factor thingy that has several microdrives in a RAID 0 stripe set, but presents itself as a single drive. mmmmm RAID 0.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Do a google search for 'holographic memory.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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 don't know about this specific instance, but in general, optical is better than electrical because it's not vunerable to electromagnetic interference causing noise on the signal. I also know that modern CPUs and other high speed components generate a lot of noise - ever tried to use an AM radio next to a computer, it's not easy. This noise both consumes power, and makes it difficult to route connections, if they are too close then they will interfere with each other and not work. If the route is too long, then it won't work either. Using optical connections could mean that the layout of boards could be simplified, and therefore use less power.
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?
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I used to do thios with an old Tandy about 15 years ago... I'd have a boot mode that would create a ram disk out of some of my extra memory, which I used mostly for games and stuff. I even wrote a few batch programs (back in the days of DOS) for some of my favorite games that would copy them to the ram disk and run it from there. A little slow on startup, but once it got going it was blazingly fast.
Eventually I couldn't do that anymore once memory requirements started going up. I've never tried doing it again under Windows, but I guess it's reasonable, since I have half a gig of memory, and windows manages to stay up for about a week or two consistantly.
-Space for rent
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.
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.
The power needed to drive that bus will be 1/2 * N * f * C * V^2 = 0.5 * 256 * 2.5*10^9 * 10*10^-12 * 3.3^2 = 35Watts.
35 watts just for interconnect! Even if the optical interfaces consume a whopping 250mW each, you can still afford 140 of them for the power cost of copper.
But wait, there's more: modern CPUs need a huge L2 cache to compensate for the narrow pipe to main RAM. If you widen the pipe, you can get away with a lot less L2 cache, which saves a lot of power (cache is typically static RAM, which has 4 to 6 transistors per bit and sucks a lot of power). Optical interconnect can potentially provide a dedicated link between each RAM unit and the CPU. The latency will probably be higher, which will penalize things like office suites that have a random pattern of memory accesses, but signal processing, graphics, and technical calculations will be blazingly fast.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
how much of a bottleneck is the bus right now?
This info is a little out of date-- it comes from Practical Unix Programming by Robbins and Robbins, published in '96.
It's a table of access times, scaled so 10 ns is equal to 1 second.
Processor cycle: 1 second
Cache access: 3 seconds
Memory access: 20 seconds
Context switch: 166 minutes
Disk access: 11 days
Notice that this table doesn't discuss bus bandwidths. The reason is simple: latency is more important than bus bandwidth for these kinds of comparisons. It doesn't matter if you can suck in 800 MB per second from RAM to CPU if getting that first byte still takes many nanoseconds.
In short, for normal server or desktop tasks, bus bandwidth isn't a serious bottleneck at all. But for traditional HPC applications, where a processor takes a huge chunk of data (measured at least in 10s of megabytes) and operates on it serially, from front to back, your bus and memory bottlenecks start to show through.
It's kind of analogous to having a car with a top speed of 250 MPH and a 0-60 time of four minutes. On the highway, once you get up to speed, you'll cruise along nicely. (Think of that as big serial computations.) But in stop-and-go traffic in the city, you're sucking. (Typical branching programs that depend on user input.)
No, my keyboard doesn't need Gb bandwidth, but all the combined peripherals daisy-chained into that one fiber port might benefit from it.
As for bending the wire sharply, copper has the same problem, although it's not quite as guaranteed as it is with fiber. With cat5, for example, the minimum bend radius is 4 times the outside diameter of the cable. And yes, I have had plenty of copper cables go bad from being bent sharply. In fact, it's the most common reason cables go bad.
Perhaps you should try thinking before you flame.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
What you need to check is the cache miss rate, I think this can be done in windows under the performance module or whatever. Believe it or not, most people only need 256k of cache and most can get by with 128k, this is why people could get away with celerons even though people laughed at them for their puny cache. Some multimedia apps need more cache (rare), hence the xeon chip. Increasing the cache beyond this point usually is futile since most data which falls outside the range is seemingly placed in a random part of memory, and sram is very expensive. I may be wrong on a couple points but I'm pretty sure the average hit rate looks similiar the graph of log(x)+ e.
Also, needing 512MB for WWIIO be a problem with drive to main memory bandwidth and latency, not main memory to cache. In other words, if you could move data ten times as fast from main mem to cache, your performance would not increase, because you're still getting misses in main memory.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
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
And what answer did he give his own question? Storage. I.e. to hold files. Not for scratch space, virtual ram, page files, swap space, however you want to put it.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Do you have any references for your assertion that the human brain in fact works by computing?
Change is inevitable.
Progress is not.
True, but presumably you could have multiple access pipes, so that you could have three or four fetches going on simultaneously. Still a problem if all the data you need is in sequential locations, if it's broken up per-chip, but it would be one way to do it.
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.)
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.
You might have one but you did not learn anything from it, did you?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I used to go around saying "&%^$& Intel and their *(^%*( proprietary Infiniband crap!", but then I did some research into it for a class project and I've changed my mind about it. The combination of Infiniband and Hypertransport is going to bring us some really fast computers in the near future (and no, despite common misconception, Infiniband and Hypertransport are not competing technologies).
A quick google search will bring you a wealth of info about it, and I highly recomend it. It was a real eye-opener for me.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.