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Superfast Optically-Based DSP Announced
dawgnut writes "An Israeli venture-funded startup has announced a digital signal processor chip that uses optical connections rather than silicon transistors. The result is a very fast chip with massive throughput for calculating fast fourier transforms that wastes very small amounts of power as heat. Interesting applications (or frightening ones depending on where you come down on the security vs. privacy thing) for remote sensors, biometrics and homeland security stuff." The prototype being showcased is rather large, but Lenslet is hoping to have it shrunk down to a chip within five years. Update: 10/31 00:22 GMT by CN : Whoops, we ran this yesterday. Mea culpa.
Ahh screw it. I can't afford to imagine it.
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
Super Fast Dupe too. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/143420 3&mode=thread&tid=137
An old soviet joke was as follows: And yet another achievement by soviet science - they have perfected the world's largest microchip!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
I can see the LAN parties now... "Will you stop it with the flashlight?!!!! Why did I buy that window kit?"
For such a small nation, with access to a hell of a lot less funding than american conglomerates. These Israeli companies sure do make some intresting inventions. From supercomputers, to genetic engineering, etc. etc.
so there.
--dw
first on-topic post ;-)
There is a nice picture of it here.
That whould be a good idea, your the 4th person to tell it's a duplicate...
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.
ps Dupe.
I was almost impressed by this, until I read up on the technology on their website. It will have a pretty limited use as it only has 8-bit precision vector/matrix MAC which is where the 8 teraflops come from. This will be fine and all for just video but it isn't much of a quantum leap for anything else (besides having an optical core). I mean it has power, but there are other chips out there that do more with greater precision numbers.
Deja vu?
[...] a digital signal processor chip that uses optical connections rather than silicon transistors. [...] The prototype being showcased is rather large, but Lenslet is hoping to have it shrunk down to a chip within five years.
...
I'm sure they didn't choose Mr. Lenslet at random for the job of shrinking optical an processor
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I saw "super-fast optical BSD" and my mouth watered.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
/.'er: Whoa. Deja vu.
/.'er: Nothing. Just had a little deja vu.
/.'er: A post on slashdot about a CPU. Then another just like it.
/.'er: It might have been. I'm not sure. What is it?
/.: Figures. Perl sucks.
Trinity: What did you just say?
Trinity: What happened? What did you see?
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same post?
Trinity: A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Wow, the light and mirrors in this chip can even produce duplicate slashdot postings!
It's not a chip, it's a module the size of a palm pilot. It *might* be a chip in 5 years. Big difference.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Interesting applications (or frightening ones depending on where you come down on the security vs. privacy thing:
You have to consider that almost anything can be abused, and in many cases the worst are the ones that we aren't prepared for. I'd say this is no more threatening than many other methods out there.
Einstein didn't predict the nuclear bomb, though it certainly made him regret his contributions
Dupes have reduced dramatically from 'those times'?
:D
Kudos to editors for bringing the dupe rate that low
Now, Come on... pour me with karma
Are there people who deliberately submit old stories to Slashdot over and over again just to see if they can catch the moderators out? Just wondering.
I hate to point out Prior Art for your Patent.. But At nearly the exact same second light was "invented" it was put to use "doing stuff". Its inital use was to Light up all the darkness :)
:)
Also there are alot of prior art examples for using it to calculate stuff too
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Great, I can just see it now: somehow the PPC edition of this future chip will still be a few mhz slower than the licensed x86 counterpart...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
New Israeli processor operates at the speed of light. A Dual-Chip system expected to be a minimum requirement for Half-Life 3.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.
Ummmm, don't electrons travel that fast anyway?
I'm a 2000 man.
Really, how hard can that be. Or do you get paid per post?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
they dont.
Note that this still doesnt bring any meaning to "compute at the speed of light", which can't actually work out if you use it in a sentence no matter how many operations per second you can get
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Well, karma might be more like a complex number than an integer. There's a real part and an imaginary one. Perhaps one of those parts is moderated on /. but I doubt that both of them are. As to which is moderated on /., Vishnu only knows...
How difficult is it to write a script that searches last week's submissions and notifies the submitter about the subject ? say, 80% word similarity with previous subject should present a dialog to the submitter saying "look, this topic has been posted yesterday; press ok to submit something new on it; press cancel to cancel the submission".
And then, slashdot reviewers will immediately see the dupe and reject it.
Most often by far, the digital signal processors are used in mobile phones these days. They are used for the speech compression and channel coding.
Would be nice to get more talk time...
"Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot." -- Paul Graham
... they'll be able to dupe articles once slashdot runs on one of these puppies!
That was a terribly interesting parenthetical aside (or frightening ones depending on where you come down on the security vs. privacy thing), don't you think? I mean, where DO you draw that line?
There is a rising clamor for the Patriot Act to be dismantled, for much the same reasoning, but should it be?
Where does privacy end and security begin, and visa-versa? Is the threat from internal terrorists over? Are we secure in our homes, workplaces, and skyscrapers; or, does the threat continue?
If we are not yet secure than what price will we pay for privacy now? It's nice for you and me to have privacy but should those who would plot to destroy our civilization have the privacy to make their plans?
Our Constitution is a wonderful document, and should endure forever, but it is not a suicide pact, after all. During times of war certain liberties have always needed to be suspended (temporarily, as in 'sunset clause') for the greater need of preserving it.
This "we all have to be free and at total liberty to do whatever we want," is an emotion that should have been put to rest when we were weaned from our mother's teat. We all have to live together; and, that means that we all can't do whatever we want, whenever we want.
It's time to grow up and hope that our leaders can get this job done before the F**cking do-gooders screw it all up and we're all bowing to Mecca.
So far they are.
Remember that there are also built-in safe guards within our Constitution that secure our continued freedoms. Things like "term limits" will stop any Commander-in-Chief from becoming too powerful. Things like our Congress, that can and do make laws with sunset clauses built-in so that we get our liberties and freedoms back once the problem is settled.
The Patriot Act has such a Sunset Clause, did you know that? It will just go away on it's own. It doesn't need your, or anybodies, help. Our (Republican) Congress did well by us there.
All this decent does, when presented too early (like now), is to embolden our enemies and make the job harder and more dangerous for our troupes. This is a political tactic to draw out the war in order to make the current administration look bad so that some pin-head can win the next election and get more of our people killed. Please don't fall for that trap. You are being played.
Some of our politicians, especially the liberals, don't care about who dies or who wins, as long as they get elected. That is their mission, the rest is just theater to them. Don't fall into that trap, and it is one. Remember, we were attacked and we are responding in a way to insure that we won't be again. That is how it should be.
It's time to grow up. The world is bigger than your basement. Don't let them play on you this way.
They live, while you sleep.
We need to protect ourselves. The current administration is doing that. The term limits and sunset clauses will put everything back the way it was before 9/11, just without the threat of further attacks. Won't that be nice? Isn't that worth something? Think about it. It's a hard world out there and the boogey-man does want to kill you!
Good night!
Keeper of the terrible karma ---