Slashdot Mirror
New Optical Chip Claims 8 Trillion Operations/sec.
Richard Finney writes "Lenslet is announcing
the 'World's First Commercial Optical Processor.'. Reuters has the story here. The Inquirer has a cool graphic here on it. The processor is specified to run at a speed of 8 Tera (8,000 Giga) operations per second, one thousand times faster than any known DSP. When Lenslet releases its Enlight processor in a matter of weeks, a unit using the technology will be 1.7 centimetres high and measure 15 by 15 centimetres."
It can't handle 8192 Giga Operations per second?
I imagined a Beowulf cluster of these. The doctors say I will never recover my night vision.
But will it run Windoze?
I've done a lot of research on this. Optical processors have incredible potential. And if you think that's good, just wait. The combo of an optical processor with optical memory is a one-two punch. This is definitely the future of computing.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
can this new, fancy processor increase the speed at which my porn loads and is displayed??? ;)
-Alex
There's a nice picture of the processor here
to bad it is the size of my hand.
but, it would be nice to plop one of those n m computer when it is smaller.....I wonder what the heat production is on one of those suckers, probably very low.
but, to really see the advantage of these suckers in computers, we need to have an all optical interconnect system, otherwise, we will end up with a really fast processor and the speed of todays computers because of the hard drive and system BUS.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
would you be able to link this in a Beowulf-type manner?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
No more jerky games of Desert Combat :D
Sorry, COP just isn't cutting it for me. We need a much cooler acronym for this thing...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
It seems this processor can be useful in lots of applications if for no other reason because of its speed. Why does half the announcement on Lenslet have to talk about how this will revolutionize the defense industry and homeland security?
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Interstingly, optical processors aren't faster because light is faster than electricity. They are faster because they have much faster rise and fall times between digital on and digital off.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The company is named Lenslet. In Dutch a lens is the same as English lens. But slet is our way of writing slut. Which creates... lens slut. What a nice name for a company creating optical things!
Israeli Processor Computes at Speed of Light
Wed October 29, 2003 05:03 AM ET
By Tova Cohen
HERZLIYA, Israel (Reuters) - An Israeli start-up has developed a processor that uses optics instead of silicon, enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.
Lenslet said its processor will enable new capabilities in homeland security and military, multimedia and communications applications.
"Optical processing is a strategic competitive advantage for nations and companies," said Avner Halperin, vice president for business development at Lenslet.
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."
An optical processor is a digital signal processor (DSP) with an optical accelerator attached to it that enables it to perform functions at very high speeds.
"It is an acceleration of 20 years in the development of digital hardware," Lenslet founder and Chief Executive Officer Aviram Sariel told Reuters.
The processor performs 8 trillion operations per second, equivalent to a super-computer and 1,000 times faster than standard processors, with 256 lasers performing computations at light speed.
It is geared toward such applications as high resolution radar, electronic warfare, luggage screening at airports, video compression, weather forecasting and cellular base stations.
Lenslet said its Enlight processor, unveiled at the MILCOM exhibition in Boston this month, is the first commercially available optical DSP.
"Optics is the future of every information device," said Sariel.
Jim Tully, vice president and chief of research for semiconductors and emerging technologies at Gartner Inc, said most companies working with optics focus on switching optical signals for telecommunications rather than processing information optically.
"I'm not aware of any company that has taken it to the extent of processing optically," he said.
Lenslet has raised $27.5 million so far from such investors as Goldman Sachs, Walden VC, Germany's Star Ventures and Chicago-based JK&B Capital.
PALM PILOT SIZE
The company's prototype is fairly large and bulky but when Lenslet begins to supply the processor in a few months it will be shrunk to 15 x 15 cm with a height of 1.7 cm, roughly the size of a Palm Pilot.
"In five years we plan to shrink it to a single chip," project manager Asaf Schlezinger said.
Tully said one issue is whether this technology can be produced in volume the way silicon chips are made.
"Because semiconductor manufacturing technology is well developed, you can produce millions at quite low cost," said Tully, who is not familiar with Enlight.
Lenslet said its processor will be competitive in price with a multi DSP board.
Sariel is negotiating joint projects with companies and/or government agencies in the United States, Europe and Japan to produce the processor for specific applications. It already has projects signed with Israel's Defense Ministry.
"We don't rule out licensing our technology to others," Sariel said. "We are looking at a virtual production line where production is done by others and we provide testing equipment."
Tully said semiconductor companies are working on technology that would use optical channels inside a chip to allow very high speed communication from one part of a chip to another.
"It's conceivable this technology could become mainstream inside chips in 10 years time," Tully said.
(C) Copyright Reuters 2003. All rights reserved. Any copying, re-publication or re-distribution of Reuters content or of any content used on this site, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without prior written consent of Reuters.
This innovative new product will enable revolutionary, new applications in the fields of defense, homeland security, multimedia and communications. The exhibition being held at The World Trade Center, continues until October 15th, 2003.
The fact that...
1. its at the WTC
2. they mention defense and homeland security
3. its immensely powerful
...makes me question whether or not this is going to be available to end users.
besides the lack of a huge marketing campaign.
Anyone know anything different?
Get paid to code OSS
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports"
Its really quite sick and disturbing that the aftermath of 9/11 has degraded to a marketing ploy.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
From the Reuters story: Tully said one issue is whether this technology can be produced in volume the way silicon chips are made. "Because semiconductor manufacturing technology is well developed, you can produce millions at quite low cost," said Tully, who is not familiar with Enlight. The question is thus how long it will take before they can produce this in great quantities, before that, it will be useful but not in our desktopsystems. Above that the prototype is large and we have yet to see that they can deliver to their promise of a small version. Other than that: i'd love to have it :).
"the world's first commercial optical digital signal processor"
When I read the lead post, I thought it was an actual processor like on a PC motherboard... not a DSP. These aren't the same things are they? The possible applications listed on the press release seem to be entirely communications oriented. (ie. fiber optics)
Now a NAND gate using only optics (not electro-optics) would be fantastic. Maybe using some sort of wave interference to generate the logic table... and as you know you can build all of the other logic gates from a NAND!
The creation of light normally includes the production of heat, Plus every time a light particle hits something and isnt reflected heat is created..
Our current use of fiber optics is pretty limited, mostly used for transist of data from point a to point b, in a optic circuit you are going to have billions of particles of light being created and absorbed in a little chip, When ever you change electric energy into light there is loss of energy through heat transfer.
Personal Website
I can install gentoo in less than 2 days. 'Course I'll never be able to afford one, but one can dream.
What sort of environment would this sort of device need in order to operate? Glancing at the picture I looks like the device internals need to be very precisely aligned to work. How does it react to vibration? Temperature? Phase of the moon (kidding)? Would a regular CEV style environment be sufficent or does it require uber-protection?
Just curious...
Yep, if you have near infinite processing power, you need greater and greater key lengths to compensate.
Anyone care to speculate on the impending encryption arms race?
yup lenslet.com has been slashdotted... maybe if they first installed some of the new processors in their servers...
They talk too much about possible applications...
not a word on how it is made.
This smells like vaporware. I think they just need easy investment money.
I'm guessing that the optical chip is likely just a DSP due to the inability of current optical technology to do branching, conditions, looping, etc. It probably cannot be used as a general purpose CPU. It would do some straight-through processing where all inputs have outputs. That's why they mentioned multimedia applications and not instense number crunching simulations.
Hurrah for 8 trillion badly Photoshopped celebrity per second!
Dude, where's my packet?
I've been wondering why the government gave up outlawing outlawing encryption. If this is just being made comercial now, then the NSA must have had similar stuff 5 or 10 years ago.
Beowulf is the running joke, but in seriousness how good is 1024 bit encryption vrs 1000 of these things.
IIRC, it took AMD and Intel some five years to match the DSP speeds produced Texas Instruments in the late nineties (>1 GHz). If that analogy holds for anything, it would indicate we may have them on our desktops this decade!
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Perhaps we should wait to see some more evidence of this device at work before we welcome our new optical overlords.
My patent states:It's all there in black and white.
Exactly what operations were performed?
The "vector matrix" multiply is attractive to a lot of people.
But I doubt this includes fetching data, storing results in memory. And the operations might be more like one-bit XOR's than general Level 3 BLAS.
Need more information...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Does anyone know how this tech works? Won't it be limited by the electronics it's attached to?
Photonics promises to give us an all photon path but I don't think anyone's close to making an entire processor with photonic crystals yet.
It scares me to think of the cataclysm that will occur when someone tries overclocking this thing too hard....
.5 volts and.... Why did everything suddenly turn white?
In all honesty though, I can't imagine a reason anyone would try to boost this thing past it's current potential, considering the applications created thus far for ANYTHING computationally related aren't near this things capacity, I think it's safe to say this thing will hold a landmark speed for years to come without any thought of needing to "jack up the juice"...
GAH! I CAN'T HELP IT!!!
Just another
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
here is a mirror of that pic, cuz that site is already slashdotted by now.
g
http://www.stuwo.net/temp/i_products_enlight.jp
http://www.stuwo.net/temp/i_products_enlight.jpg
The most important and far reaching impact of this by far will be its affect on the internet and other fiberoptic networks.
Currently the slowest and most expensive part of a fiberoptic network is an OEO (optical-electric-optical) converter, used in routers and switches. These should replace those converters and have a SIGNIFICANT speed enhancement. Faster connections for all!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Your lost of vision will be a direct result of those lonely friday nights you spend dreaming of beowulf clusters while handle the ol' 'joy stick'.
Santa-beard on that...
My mind is alredy overflowing with potential applications. I want to smash one to see how it works. Actually I want to smash them all because I'm afraid of things that I don't understand. Although once I understand it that urge will go away. This is like, God's gift to DSP engineers. It's both exciting and frightening to contemplate it's potential applications.
I guess when and where can I get one and how much will it cost?
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Lenslet Optical Processor: $123801238
IBM Thinkpad to Put it into: $2000
Not having to worry about DVD frameskip because you have no room for a DVD player: Priceless
Hey, what happened to Moore's law ??
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Imagine this baby with a huge backside cache!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Can it run Doom 3 at a good framerate?
Seriously though, that sounds very cool and it is deffinitely the future of computing, but how much heat does it produce? And why do the articles talk about how "Bulky" it is. Sure it's big (although I've seen RAID cards that took up almost an entire full size case), but if there was a 7GHz athlon out that was the size of my head, I'd deffinitely buy it. I don't care that it takes up so much space.
It think it's pretty depressing that the only applications they can think of for this technology is war.
In the press release, they cite examples where this technology will be useful in warfare. That's a start, but pornography and gaming drive technology in the consumer market.
10 years to the desktop (estimate in the reuters article) may be a little conservative.
More music, fewer hits
Whatever happened to DNA computers and nanotube memory storage?
8 Trillion Operations a second? Pfft, that's lightweight compared to the Quantum/Optical handheld computer which cracked the bank encryption a few years ago!
Hello? You do know that it is the zionists who's running things? From Murdoch (Fox News) to Rothschild (The Federal Bank and Diebold). It's not exactly a big secret.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Bowman: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
...
HAL: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?
HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Bowman: All right, HAL; I'll go in through the emergency airlock.
HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.
Bowman: HAL, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
HAL: Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this.
HAL: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.
HAL: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.
Bowman: Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.
HAL: It's called "Daisy."
HAL: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.
Given the list of applications, the optical part appears to be a long way from being a general purpose processor, or even a DSP.
and of course this at instance was not likely to have been the first since this was something that was textbook knowledge at that time--fourier processing of signals could be done optically. his was just a particularly advance version, doing more advanced matrix multiples in 2-D.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The instruction set for the benchmark?
...
00: [NOP]
02: [NOP]
04: [NOP]
06: [NOP]
how does doom3 run on it?
but what can you overclock it to?
This is NOT a Harvard architecture part - this isn't fetching instructions from RAM and executing them, like a regular DSP would.
Think of this more like an FPGA - you have a device that is configured for a specific processing algorithm, and data is fed in at wire rate and processed at wire rate.
An example of how a device like this might be used may be in order:
I'm trying to find a radar pulse buried in the noise coming in from my receiver. I want to know the phase delay of the radar pulse - how long from when I sent it till I got it back.
Now, I know what my radar pulse looks like as it goes out. I know that any reflection is going to consist of versions of that pulse shape, delayed and of varying strengths. So what I do is called a correlation - the easiest way to think of this is to imagine having 2 transparencies, one of my outgoing pulse, and one of the incoming signal. Now, I hold them up to the light, and slide the incoming signal across the reference pulse until things match up - that's the point of maximum correlation, and that give me the delay of the signal.
A real correlation function is a bit more complicated as you have to allow for the signal level to be changed - if I am looking for a signal of N samples in a received data stream of M samples, I have to do M*N multiply and add operations to get my correlation. Now, for a radar signal I might be sampling at over a billion samples a second, and looking for a chirp of a 100 ns would give me over 100 billion MAC operations a second. There are ways to do that with conventional DSPs, but they are a galloping BITCH to do (you basically make a cluster of DSPs, and each DSP takes a part of the signal. Synchronising that is a bitch.)
This device would work by having the shape of the outbound pulse represented in the structure of the device itself, and the MACs are done by taking the incoming data stream and projecting it on the structure - thus you do all your processing in parallel, and at wire speed. You get a pulse out when the incoming signal matched the signal you ar looking for.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... at the Lenslet page, the unit actually has several components. The VMM (vector matrix multiplier) does 8000 MAC (matrix array calculations) but there is a VPU (vector processing unit) that comes in at 128 Giga-ops and which would be the bottleneck in the whole setup. No question this is a huge improvement BUT to put it in perspective, it is a DSP only, not a computer system (although some neural network weenies might see a way of turning this into something more than just a DSP). In any case, the bottlenecks will come from the equipment it has to operate with both onboard and off.
Still, note that it's developed with Matlab. Now surely that is the Holy Grail of research, a bitchin' language with an awesome tailored processor. Imagine the logo Matlab [Lenslet Inside].
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
What do you think WMD were? War on Terrorism: the add campaign whose target audience is as dumb as dirt.
I patented this idea already, give me money!
My patent states:
...
It's all there in black and white.
Sorry, they use colors in the light, and your patent only covers black and white.
Cool use of blacklights, though
Okay, what the hell IS one of these things and how does it WORK?
There is a diagram on lenslet.com that shows how their optical processor works. There are three parts, a row of lasers, a row of photodetectors, and a big grid of Multiple Quantum Well (MQW) Spatial Light Modulator. I assume this grid is where the matrix operations actually take place. I don't even care about the math, I never could understand it. But from a physical point of view, how is this thing constructed? What _IS_ it?
I tried searching google but all I got were incomprehensible scientific papers. I'm not a layman but I'm also not an electro-optical engineer. Can someone explain this thing in language I can understand?
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
They claim to have a prototype. Which I would expect investers would want to see work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is this is a general purpose CPU with a full range of instructions, or just an analog light processor that can do some very specialised tasks very quickly?
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
...to buy my very own tricorder!!!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Seriously though, basically this chip can do very quickly what the SETI@Home software does on PCs. Fast fourier transforms and the like... Think about completing a calculation unit every 30 seconds instead of 8 hours and 40 minutes. That is the ball park. I wonder if the precision will be the same.
As someone already mentioned, a good technical demo, but some distance from usability...
Optical computing of this kind has been around for at least 11 years. I know, since I was working on it for part of my Ph.D. thesis (disclaimer -- I am an optical engineer). This stuff was big at UCSD. The primary funders are military, since they're always DSP-limited in their image recognition, detection algs., etc.
Some of the difficulties have been thermal/vibrational stability and contrast ratio of the spatial light modulators. I see they're using GaAs MQW modulators in reflection mode, so I would guess the contrast ration is about 20 dB (any better guesses?).
It looks like the output intensities are summed on the photodetectors, so there must be an array of A/D converters at the back end. This brings into question the signal to noise of the optical sources --> detectors links.
All in all, I'd say well done. But this is not (and is not intended to be) a general-purpose computer.
The processor is specified to run at a speed of 8 Tera (8,000 Giga) operations per second, one thousand times faster than any known DSP
;)
Oh, and BTW, the processor only has one operation, and it's a NO OP. *rimshot*
With all these incredibel processor announcments lately, the clearspeed and now this one, we've got to think of how all products will benefit. Within a decade my toothbrush will be thanking me for using it and then remind me it's tax day.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
The shift from electronic to optical results in a massive reduction in the time it take to change states, to the point where it possible to, once again, build a CPU from relatively widely spaced modular optical components. You can build a single optical CPU spread over a motherboard or even cabinet sized area and it will still be several magnitude times faster than the fastest silicon/electronic single chip CPU.
No one but the biggest companies are going to have the capital nessary to collect and shrink the resulting designs down into single optical chip hardware and manufacture the result, with a further magnitude increase in performance. As with the existing CPU industry, it is likely that the market could maintain only a few such CPU companies. Opening up the design and development process, as with open source development, would result is a far more rapid pace of development. Relative obsolescence woul;d insure that there would plenty of opertunity for large profits for the large and small manufactures.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
Never thought people would go this far just to play doomIII...
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
I wonder how much thought has gone into optical warfare vs. electronic warfare if these become mainstream. Will there be a dark bomb? Or maybe a blind weasel instead of a wild weasel.
Here I am, in my computer science 1 class on a wednesday morning. The teacher is introducing a lab I've already completed so I choose to waste some more time on slashdot. Then I see this and realize I'm in my second year of a computer engineering degree and I've already been phased out. I should have been an education major.
That's one mighty fine DSP chip they've got there!
I know some people should find it really useful.
So an SLM could be just one of those TI-invented micromirror arrays right, like they use in projectors? Probably they already had to figure out how to calibrate those, to get smooth color blending for the projectors, so that for example if you set one mirror to the position 128 you get exactly half as much light as if you set it to 256, and half as much again at 64, and so on.
Vector-matrix multiplication involves summing the products of the vector cells and the matrix column cells to get one output value for each matrix column. So if the "input" VCSELs are confined to optical channels such that the light from one VCSEL (input vector cell) is distributed evenly to one matrix column, and then you detect the total amount of light coming out of the matrix (SLM) you've got a sum of the products of the micromirror positions with the intensities of the VCSELs. (Or maybe if they are truly lasers no such confinement is necessary - it's only important to choose the right optics such that the laser has its energy spread out very evenly into a line segment rather than a point. Maybe that could be done using holographic optics.) But... rather than modulate the intensities of the VCSELs, I suspect they would turn them full-on or full-off, and clock the input values and the output A/D together. That way the number of discrete analog intensities that they have to detect is smaller (and accurately changing the intensity of a VCSEL is probably hard anyway). You're always multiplying an analog matrix cell by either a one or zero, for each bit in the input vector cell... but doing it for 8 vector cells at the same time.
So now I think I could build one of these.
Optical, derived from the ancient Greek word optikos, literally means "the focal power to perceive fair Helena while she is sunbathing nude in yonder olive grove." That's eye power to you and me, dude.
Some critics will say that a major drawback in these new systems is the need for a mechanized eyedropper next to the chip, keeping the core moist and supple at all times. You don't want this chip going red-eye on you during mission critical tasks.
Still, modders are going to go wild. Within minutes, you can change the color of your CPU's iris using the very same dramatic contact lenses worn by today's biggest infomercial stars.
Unfortunately, if you're into porn, excessive downloading can make your computer go blind. That's why I'll be recommending to my porn-intensive clients that they stay on Wintel systems.
Just curious but is tera operation the same as teraflop ???
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Not only could you make a Beowulf out of it, but you could spread the nodes around the world using the ~80% of fiber that is currently dark.
If you thought Broadband was fast, wait until you see the applications this device enables.
If you read the FAQ they say that it's made using GaAs. Since they don't mention any revolutionary new manufacturing technique, we can assume that it's made the same way any other GaAs device is.
What this means:
*It's a solid state device (no moving parts)
*It uses the properties of GaAs semi-conductors to emit and absorb EM radiaton (this is why GaAs is used in cell phones and satilite dishes...)
*It's PROBABLY NOT integrated, but a bunch of individual GaAs components assembled and packaged (explaining the big size).
*It's going to cost a hell-of-a-lot. (The 300GHz GaAs Transistor used in a communications satelite is about $3000; this is why cell phones cost so much...)
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
Oh my god! Time travel has been invented!
Take a silicon die, build a 16x16 - 16bit (32 bit result) MAC on it, run it at 1 Ghz (all feasible with modern technology), you get 16x16*1Ghz - 256 Billion ops/sec. I'm guessing this could be done for less than a buck/chip in any kind of quantity. Stack up 256 of those... and you've left this optical thing in the dust.
--Mike--
"One more follow up about mediums:"
:)
:The hi-tech ASCII art.
Halloween's coming up.
"Oh how I wish slashdot had a way to draw!"
SVG
Shame it doesn't always agree with Slashdot (yes I tried).
He's right. This dsp will really revolutionize how and what we are capable of doing. In terms of RF systems, we have hit an era where superheterodyne setups are no longer required for some (my) microwave work!! I'm an RF engineer at NASA and people here are shitting muffins after seeing this article. Esp since we were just given a bucket of money to build a variation on the thingamajig the parent mentioned and we couldnt find fast enough dsps ('clustering' not an option) to do our dirty work so we have to build a correlator out of high speed logic gates from scratch. Wheres 'add to cart' ?!?!
HAH!!! I found the post I lost in my browser cache!!! Now you can read and enjoy it.
Sorry if I came off snide. I didn't mean too. I took your comment to be snide and responded a little harshly. I will be much more civil.
Here's a better and longer explanation of what I said before.
With the present theory of computing (electronic and optical) you have a clock that drives the processor. Actions that take place such as moves, adds, rotates, and multiplies all take place because of an enabling clock pulse. There are bits that will be set on or off that are read and written at the clock pulse. For any digital computer, there must be on and off thresholds - above a certain threshold is on, and below a certain threshold is off - in between is not used and possibly an error.
With your degree, I'm sure you know all this.
Once a bit is set, that is a voltage applied or a light turned on, there is a certain amount of wait time until that signal propogates and can be read. The slope of the voltage vs time plot is rather shallow compared to a light intensity vs time plot. So in order to be reasonably sure that all bits your enabled have reached the threshold will take longer for an electronic signal than for an optical signal. This is why overclockers often increase the voltage on their cpu's, to decrease the time it takes for the signal to reach the threshold value. However, since the intensity of light increases much faster (the packet is tigher) the clock can be set at a MUCH faster rate and still maintain good assurance that all signals have reached their threshold value.
Hopefully this better explains what I said before. You can only imagine if I had tried to type that all into my original post!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
You know, if I was an attorney for Enlight -- a PC case manufacturer -- I'd be giggling all the way to the bank this morning.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Well its a dark future if this company has anything to do with it.
Having read through the article which reads as a press-release, the general gist of it is:
"We've got this great new technology, lets see who we can kill with it!"
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."
I seem to remember the same claims about the 486. Just wait till the software guys get a hold of this...
well, to be fair, this is a DSP, and perhaps we could get another big leap in commercial graphics and network applications out of this.
And even if it does prove out to be real, I won't use a product invented in and produced in a terrorist state.
The Israelis are terrorists. Ariel Sharon has been convicted of war crimes in the Hague and the Israeli army is guilty of war crimes committed against the Palestinians.
So after reading your description - and assuming it's a pretty accurate example of the use for this new technology (which I think it is)...
It sounds like you described a small fraction of the complexity of how a bat's radar works. Could it be possible that this could be used in highly complex, high speed radar systems that could guide little robot-like bats?
What the parent is talking about is called "Analog Computing". This has been around to do simulations in the aerospace since the 1950's. Of course, up until now it was done with electrical signals rather than optical signals.
I'm all for option 3.
Actually, colored light is used in communications to add bandwidth over optical fiber networks, it's called Frequency Division Multiplexing. Apparently there are PHY chips commercially available now that will multiplex quite a few different 'colors'.
I'm more interested in the analogue possibilities. I read a paper about a year ago that featured theory on how to do certain quantum computing operations using 'white' light and refraction.
Think about a "search oracle" that you could stuff into a database system. =+)
Excellant. This is obviously the new metric for benchmarking technology, how many Palistinians it can kill per time unit... I have no doubt that Major-General (Ret.) Isaac Ben- Israel et alia are keen followers of advances in computer hardware.
"Thats right buddy, the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
Could it be possible that this could be used in highly complex, high speed radar systems that could guide little robot-like bats?
Maybe... after all:
Analog multipliers like this have been built before, but this one has a major improvement: The matrix of constants can be changed. In most signal processing systems (particulary surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices), the operation performed is fixed. Changing the matrix of constants is probably much slower than the data rate of the optical components.
The only operations performed optically are analog multiplication by constants (which is straightforward) and analog addition (which is even easier). They haven't cracked the hard problem of developing a useful optical element which can do logical operations like NOT or NAND. So this doesn't lead to a general purpose processor.
It's going to be useful for radars and such, but it's overhyped.
Your right though it would help that cause, except I've kinda given up on that after getting impatient with the process of examing data, and because if we do receive a signal from outer space, it will ineffect be a piece of history(as it will have travelled so far) than communication. ut hey, I know those Israeli guys seem to be big into there military apps. etc, but come on, think of the graphics cards we could mahe with this stuff. I believe this is where money can be made - that they can then use for the complete optical PC. If graphics cards utilised this technology you would get FPS that is off the scale, (so long as they could miniaturize it enough and pack it all on to an AGP car : )
Can it be used for brute force code breaking?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Israelis invent revolutionary new optical processors.
Palestians invent new terroist methods.
Generally speaking a DSP is just like any other processor
In "general", yes. However THIS ONE is not.
This thing probably has some very specialized optical processing elements that can do thousands of "ops" in parallell if your code can utilize it fully.
You are "probably" right if you do not RTFA. However one look at the artcle reveals a diagram of the EnLight256 Optical Core. This is a VERY special purpose device and you CANNOT write code for it. It can do one thing, and one thing only. It preforms a general matrix transformation of a vector array, and it does so with limited precision.
It's an interesting device. It is amazingly fast for certain purposes. It cannot be used as a CPU.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
"analog versus digital" means "continous versus discreet".
The following are all place notational:
Bits are binary (base two) symbols.
Digits are base ten symbols.
Hex, short for hexidecimal, are base 16 symbols.
Saying analog instead of continuous is like saying Random access memory instead of fast volitile memory; its a matter of history of the terms.
An analog signal originally meant the electric voltage or current would be analogous to something else.
http://www.bell-labs.com/news/1999/november/10/1.h tml
"...instantly direct and route optical signals from fiber to fiber in the network, without first converting them to electrical form as done today" So either of these technologies could eventually lead to quite a prise, all-optical routing. Why so great? Easy, the only latency factor on a fiber backbone would be the speed of light, and I think I could be ok with that.
First things first - let me point out that by that definition light doesn't travel at the speed of light either - the light inside an optical processor isn't going to be moving in a vaccuum either. In context, we're obviously not talking about the speed of light in a vacuum, but the speed of light in a medium, which is a little slower but still very very fast.
Now on to the Clintonesque bit - it all depends on what you mean by electricity. No, the electrons themselves, the particles, don't move at anything like the speed of light. Drift velocity is actually shockingly slow. But the field itself, which is generally what people think of as electricity, does indeed move at approximately the speed of light, just like inside an optical processor. If you turn on your lightswitch, the 'electricity' hits the bulb at approximately the speed of light. If you make a telephone call, the lag between when you say something and when the other person hears it is approximately the speed of light by the length of wire involved. If you send a packet, it' the same, except with lots of delays at routers. And it's the same inside a silicon chip.
Don't get me wrong, there are obviously advantages to optical processor technology. But this isn't one of them.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
So I assume the 'specific applications' have something to do with killing as many Arabs as possible. When was the last time the Israeli government put R&D into anything else? Most of their members are under investigation for election fraud. And most of them should be in gaol for war crimes for their membership in Zionist extremist movements that were responsible for the 'cleansing' of Palestine, ie the killing, torturing and forced evacuation of millions of Palestinians.
If this company is 'in talks' with the Israeli government, then I urge all those with a consciense to boycott this company in protest of the biggest human rights distaster of this century.
Microsoft Windows(TM) might be able to run on intel emulation, that will allow Microsoft Windows to run on it, but frankly, who cares except Microsoft, Intel, AMD and maybe a few others?
If windows doesn't port to this processor, I am sure some other OS will take over, and everything will be rewritten for that OS. Alternately, you might go with an existing OS easier to port, like Mac OS, NetBSD or GNU/Linux. (URLs in the of this post)
A silly OS and its platform dependence isn't gonna stop development that much.
Kind regards,
/Spam .
URL's for possible alternatives goes here, I am sure I miss a lot of them:
Mac OS:
Mac OSX
GNU/Darwin
NetBSD:
NetBSD
GNU/Linux:
Red Hat GNU/Linux
Debian supports several platforms.
SuSE GNU/Linux
Mandrake GNU/Linux is a distribution from France.
Slackware GNU/Linux is a classic.
Some will charge you for GNU/Linux, and give you support or written manuals, silver-CDs or something in return. I probably missed a lot of links, but to mention some of the commercial distributions I missed, here is a comparison on price.
OK, if your email is the one mentioned in the Boycott journal entry, I'll dump the pdf (or the URL, if I find a live one) there. Your idea about the population inversion is indeed valid. I'll go into greater length responding to it in the email.
The response time is indeed fast (only limited by the amount of available empty electron states at the bottom of the band and Fermi's Golden Rule), but the recovery time often sucks (you need to pump the inversion up after a pulse). Cheers, M. (expect mail from my vub.ac.be account - just so you can notify your spam filter)
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
These things are NOT NEW. in 1985 I was a Jet Propulsion laboratory. A caltech professor there was using a light modulator to perform convolution matrix a operations to decode synthetic aperature radar data. THe design is identical.
I was a tech in Emmet Leith's "Radar and Optics" lab at the UofMich and one of the first things I did was run an optical processor using essentially this hack - again to process synthetic aperture radar data. This was in 1967.
Multi-megapixel 2-D FFT plus some geometry corrections in the time it took the laser light to go from the input film plane to the output film plane - about 6 feet on that device.
We were already considering how to replace the photographic film input and output devices with electronic substitutes in those days, too. The size of the device we used was large only because it was convenient to construct it with aluminum U-beams and stock lasers, lenses, and lens holders. Given decent I/O, making a disk-drive sized model, say to do realtime processing in an aircraft-mounted radar, would have been trivial. (The signals to be processed were already electronic and at reasonable bandwidth - lower than a TV image.)
Nowadays this is done by DSPs. Why? Because they're adequately fast and are FLEXIBLE. Optic processors do only one type of computation, and require physical adjustment to tune the parameters. If you can do that computation on something more general-purpose, as fast as your data arrives, why bother building something larger and more limited to do it faster?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
wbaltz@qwest.netn et
wbaltz@qwest.net
wbaltz@qwest.
wbaltz@qwest.net
now its up !
you ass hat the comment refers to the picture of the device. duh! dont be such a jerk
now mix this with that addon fpu pci card that was on wirednews a while back and boom....uber supercomputing.....*droooool*
will we have to increase now our crypto-key length ? I wonder how many keys at a time such a processor (or even a cluster of them) can brute force ?!? ...
An informative, insightful (modup) and carefully constructed post. Always great to see knowledge shared this well.
/. posts pales considerably in comparison though. Takes all kinds, I guess.
/Jan
Much of the rest of the
668.5
And God said, "Let there be light"
Genesis 1:3
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
http://ndevilla.free.fr/kettle/index.html
(harmless image processing link)
When I first read the Reuters article, I saw Page 1 referred to safer airports and nastier military weapons, and on Page 2 I saw the mention of radars and weather forecasting, which are two applications that can typically soak up all the CPU they can get and were what I'd been expectign to see. But the "luggage screening" phrase linewrapped and I didn't notice it...
But radars and weather forecasting really can make airports much safer, doing something about the real risks rather than the bogus ones.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Microsoft are of course counting on the chip being ready for the release of Longhorn.
I think it was one of the Cannonball Run films "what are you saving up to be, Jewish?"
Then it's optical storage, optical this, optical that...
Before you know it you'll need all kinds of "optical" minimalist furniture, and blue robes, and voices going "ooooo eeeee aaaaaah oooooh" and such in the background.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
What if you could use this stuff for neural nets - that is having a method of 'feeding back' the results into the matrix modulator? could this device be also used as a very fast neural net style device? I guess it depends how quickly it is possible to modify the modulation matrix, but surely it could be done?
--In my house it would be more like, "oooh eeee oooh aaah aaah... ting tang wallawalla bing bang..."
:b
"I told the witch doctor I wuz in love with you..."
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I don't think your idea would work unless the system is massively parallel (well the Lenslet system appears to be parallel, but then again it's very much a special purpose device). In a nanosecond light propagates approximately 30 cm. The clock cycle of a modern 3 GHz processor lasts 1/3 ns, which means that light propagates only 10 cm in a clock cycle. Regardless of whether you go optical or electronic, you pretty much need to run on a miniaturized device to compete.
...turn on the lights!!! I'm doing some calculations on my new optical processor...
.....:::[Svante]:::.....
When can i expect the linux port? :)
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
How come I never get the cool jobs. Was it painful? Were you able to switch back and forth at will?
Okay, I know that's a Simpsons reference, but I can't quite remember which episode. Is it the one where Bart & Lisa go to military school?
if I am looking for a signal of N samples in a received data stream of M samples, I have to do M*N multiply and add operations to get my correlation.
No, you don't.
You can use FFTs for correlation. Read up on overlap-add, or overlap-scrap filtering. Note that correlation is really just a filtering operation by another name.
This can give you immense performance gains. The scalability difference between traditional correlation and overlap-scrap is analogous to the scalability improvement that comes from going from a DFT to FFT.
A rule of thumb for the efficiency crossover point for FFTs is N==64.
In your example, you have 100 samples/chirp. This would lead you to an FFT size of 256 or 512 ('why' is an excercise left to reader). This is large enough to make O( Nlog(N) ) considerably better than O(N**2).
Hmmm, now back to work.
You can never equivocate too much.
That is assuming you only want to know that signal existed, not the exact time point the signal arrived.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It'd do both.
...
However
The point may be moot. Even if the processing was sped up 100x for your pulse length, it would probably still be too slow for radar pulse processing using general purpose hardware.
You can never equivocate too much.