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Intel Devises Chip Speed Breakthrough
Chad Wood writes "According to the New York Times (free reg. req.), Intel has demonstrated a research breakthrough, making silicon chips that can switch light like electricity. The article explains:''This opens up whole new areas for Intel,' said Mario Paniccia, a an Intel physicist, who started the previously secret Intel research program to explore the possibility of using standard semiconductor parts to build optical networks. 'We're trying to siliconize photonics.' The invention demonstrates for the first time, Intel researchers said, that ultrahigh-speed fiberoptic equipment can be produced at personal computer industry prices. As the costs of communicating between computers and chips falls, the barrier to building fundamentally new kinds of computers not limited by physical distance should become a reality, experts say.'"
No req. required
"We've taken two AMD chips and put them both dual configuration with a giant 'Intel' sticker on top. Then, we sell it for twice what we paid, and get the lusers... err, I mean... users to buy it because it says 'Intel Inside.'"
So when do I get my new high-speed fiber line? :D
Does this mean that we may be able to overclack without regard to temperature? Will optical technology make the processors run cool? I really hope so.
that it will have to be x86 compatible, or it will never fly.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This kind of technology seems like a very healthy step toward making computers resistant to electromagnetic waves and/or pulses (aided also by the rise of optical storage devices), which is great for us humans now. But now what are we going to use against the "squiddies" when they come for our hovercrafts?
Esoteric reference.
When we get off of binary, then we'll be making progress, in my humble opinion. I mean, we've been using binary for-ever! Imagine the size and speed gains we would get if we could now have three or four states per bit.
What is your penile percentile?
SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- In an advance that could inexpensively speed up corporate data centers and eventually personal computers, researchers used everyday silicon to build a device that converts data into light beams.
Light-based communications has until now largely been the realm of large telecom companies and long-haul fiber-optic networks because of the expense of the exotic materials required to harness photons, the basic building block of light.
Now, researchers at Intel Corp. say their results with silicon promise to reduce the cost of photonics by introducing a well-known substance that's more readily available.
In the study, published in Thursday's journal Nature, the Intel researchers reported encoding 1 billion bits of data per second, 50 times faster than previous silicon experiments. They said they could achieve rates of up to 10 billion bits per second within months.
"This is a significant step toward building optical devices that move data around inside a computer at the speed of light," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer.
Intel believes the finding could have profound implications for the links between servers in corporate data centers. Eventually, the technology could find its way into personal computers and even consumer electronics.
"It is the kind of breakthrough that ripples across an industry over time, enabling other new devices and applications," Gelsinger said. "It could help make the Internet run faster, build much faster high-performance computers and enable high bandwidth applications like ultra-high-definition displays or vision recognition systems."
Unlike electrons that flow through copper connections common today, the photons in light are not susceptible to data-slowing interference and can travel farther.
The Intel researchers built a device called a modulator, which switches light into patterns that translate into the ones and zeros of the digital world.
A light beam was split into two as it passed through the silicon, which has tiny transistor-like devices that alter light. When the beams are recombined and exit the silicon, the light goes on and off at a frequency of 1 gigahertz, or a billion times a second.
Infrared light is used because it can pass through silicon.
"Just as Superman's X-ray vision allows him to see through walls, if you had infrared vision, you could see through silicon," said Mario Paniccia, a study author and director of Intel's silicon photonics research. "This makes it possible to route light in silicon, and it is the same wavelength typically used for optical communications."
The researchers expect to be able to increase the frequency to 10 gigahertz, making the technology commercially viable, said Victor Krutul, senior manager of Intel's silicon photonics technology strategy.
"This implies that the economies of scale that we have seen for the electronics industry could one day apply to the photonics industry," Graham T. Reed, a professor of optoelectronics at the University of Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute, said in a commentary that accompanied the research paper.
With new AOL IntelSpeed (tm) I can compute faster than ever! All my friends and family use AOL IntelSpeed (tm), too!
"Chip Speed"? I mean, really, come on. Wouldn't "Intel makes optical computing breakthrough" be a far more descriptive and meaningful thing to say?
To say nothing of the fact that if you just say "Intel makes Chip Speed Breakthrough" we will all assume that this actually means "Intel makes Marketing Breakthrough".
the barrier to building fundamentally new kinds of computers not limited by physical distance should become a reality, experts say
I think the universe might disagree. The speed of light is a limiting factor. The speed of electrons/transistor switching is what we're hitting now. (takes more than one clock cycle for a signal to propogate accross a chip) We will exchange that for a the light/photothingie switching speed that will be higher. This is not limitless.
Also, not limited by physical distance? Are these guys on crack? My Quake game is limited by physical distance. It takes 100ms to go across the country and back. Latency is the killer here.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
"We're trying to siliconize photonics"
....yada yada yada...
...Look, how fast will the thing go, and will I end up starting a fire in my PC from overheat?
We're trying to morph bleeding-edge content
We're trying to facilitate sticky experiences
We're trying to productize user-centric convergence
We're trying to empower extensible networks
We're trying to synthesize revolutionary ROI
We're trying to matrix e-business technologies
We're trying to cultivate impactful relationships
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
-1 they don't work.
Photonics == lasers
So this technology should also revolutionize the mod scene and therefore dramatically effect Slashdot's front page.
I wonder how many kids will accidentally burn their eyes out looking into the light?
What did Moore have to say about this?
"The device Intel has built is the prototype of a high-speed silicon optical modulator that the company has now pushed above two billion bits per second at a lab near its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. The modulator makes it possible to switch off and on a tiny laser beam and direct it into an ultrathin glass fiber. Although the technical report in Nature focuses on the modulator, which is only one component of a networking system, Intel plans on demonstrating a working system transmitting a movie in high-definition television over a five-mile coil of fiberoptic cable next week at its annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco."
...or is this (Moore's Law)^2 ?
Better yet...will this be meazured in LHz (Ludicrous-hertz)?
I am far more interested in overquacking then I am in overclacking. ;)
overclocking is right out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... "as the costs of communicating between chips and computers falls," that fundamentally new kinds of computers would become a reality, and not the barriers to their development.
...building fundamentally new kinds of computers not limited by physical distance should become a reality...
So they've broken the lightspeed barrier? Amazing!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
... is the coolest technology you've never heard of.
For some reason, buried among a zillion dog-eared back issues of "People" and "Sports Illustrated" at the Seattle's Best Coffee shop at the corner of Central and Kirkland Way in Kirkland, Washington, somebody left a copy of Photonics Spectra in the magazine rack. I'm an electronics geek who had never heard of the field, and I probably spent three hours and two quad-damage lattes poring over that magazine. Fucking amazing stuff. Spend some time at the photonics.com website if you don't believe me.
Seriously, photonics looks like it might be the Next Big Thing.
Great now we'll only have to buy from two companies in the future Intel and Microsoft.
Seriously though, when I hear some chip news, and how it's the 'next best thing' I kind of wonder how much is just marketing hype. So far I heard of terabyte chips... Coming Soon!!!... Faster chipset will do... and so on. Yet on the market you see none. According to most companies capabilities (providing it's not just hype), from what I gather, they have a chipset in the works that can fly you to the moon, wash your car, bone your partner, and have you back in time for work the next morning. However, these companies have to make as much money as they possibly can selling you their fourth, third, and second generation chips for the next few years.
MoFscker
What will it cost? Something an order of magnitude above Pentium Extreme(ly expensive) Edition? Will it be compatible with anything?
Given the current press reports from the White House and David Kay, how do we know we can trust this intel?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Disclaimer: I am a Ph.D. in fiber optic physics
This is a 2 Gb/s modulator, whereas III-V semiconductor modulators above 40 Gb/s are commericially available.
A modulator by itself is nothing new, and not the whole story. You need optical waveguides with bending radii much smaller than currently available for routing, and optical logic gates which are an even worse problem.
The article doesn't describe the technology -- is it electroabsorption? Mach-Zehnder?
Nevertheless, a small and fast silicon modulator has obvious commercial value, even if it isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread.
JDS Uniphase's stock start to go up on this. Me, I'd love to go optical. And I'm sure JDS wouldn't mind selling some fiber and related supplies...
C|N>K
It's actually easier to google for the URL then click the link to it so you have google.com as a referrer...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
My friend you ROCK!
I have a name and ID of my own...but shit what a good idea...gives a whole new meaning to slashdot effect.
what?
If I bought a clear case, would the processor eminate a cool glow? .7 seconds instead of 2 seconds? If so, do I really need this?
And, will this processor make OOo open in
So now the only barrier is the speed of light? Or do I need a nice warp core sitting in my living room to overclock?
What Intel seems to be discussing is much faster transmission rates though the line (ie: bandwidth), which in itself is a really good thing if it's being done at reasonable heat and power levels.
I have a feeling this will one day be seen as a development with the same order of importance as say, the development of the first semiconductor. However, it will probably take at least a decade to sort out all of the implications.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
When they say, "new class of computing applications" I take that to mean that this is the type of technology that Microsoft would take advantage of to facilitate a
If the transfer speeds are fast enough for this type of technology, couldn't we expect it to eventually get fast enough to replace set top boxes? We could be buying and running services instead of programs within the next decade, theoretically killing software piracy. Scary.
I love generalization.
...but is it UV reactive? Does it match my LED fans? It is an Intel so I assume it glows blue, right?
Quit staring at me.
Its an interesting breakthrough, but only from the standpoint of manufacturing high speed optical interconnect systems using standard silicon as the substrate material. It would seem that the technology still relies on standard electronic computation, but has a convenient way to convert eletronic signals into photonic ones on a standard silicon chip (versus the more exotic materials currently used for optical modulators).
Rather than create all-optical processors, this technology will be useful for building gigabit fiber interfaces directly into everyday silicon chips. I'd think that the next step for this stuff will be cheap fiber connections between peripherals and interal subsystems (Optical ATA anyone?) Then they will look to create optical traces that connect Intel processors, cache, RAM, I/O chips (if they can figure out how to mass-produce a optical fiber traces on a PCB).
This breakthrough more of an interconnection technology than a computation technology.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Luminium?
Al for short?
don't do that.
I tried to hold out on buying dvds until holographic storage became available - for the last 5 years.
Gave up and decided to live one technology behind the current thing - cheap, fast enough, reliable and supported.
Photonic chips and holographic storage should work really well together - in 5 or 10 years or whenever its decided to reopen the wounds on the bleeding edge.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
It might just be me, but I sure as hell remember reading an article about breakthroughs of this type, maybe a little too close, last august or september. Anyone else remember seeing that? I will note that I do not remember reading anything about Intel being involved with it.
So much hate for intel.
I get the feeling they could announce the invention of time travel and there would still be 100 posts regarding temperatures, monolpolies, power consumption and AMD love.
Oh, and dont forget the 20 posts from bedroom engineers letting us know why it just wont work. - Thanks guys.
Can you guys all shut up about Pentium and clockspeed for crying out loud?
This is about optical networking using silicon as the semiconductor. Not about a CPU.
Everyone who doesn't understand what an optical modulator is can go post on the latest SCO story. That is all.
They have finally developed a DLP
Computing at the speed of light. Oh, wait, bottlenecks. Damn you serial ATA Hard Drive!!!
Problem is to have three or four states, you need more complex circuity. Binary is simple and works well. A bit it a gate, a transistor. It's on or it's off, 1 or 0. Well if I want to represent four states, how do I do that? I guess I need to do it by voltage or amperage level. MEans I need a more complicated circut.
Give you something of a parallel in another digital field:
Digital CD audio is stored as 16-bits per sample, 44,100 samples per second. Well that means that to convert the digital data to analogue, which is what sound waves are, you need to change the output voltage of the state 44,100 times per second, and do it to a resolution of 65,536 different levels. Originally, D/A converters tried to do just that, and failed rather miserably. It was just all hell to build a circut that could do a good job of controling voltage that accurately that quick in that fashion.
The answer, it turns out, came from computers and high current variable speed electric motors. Motors of that type are controlled using what is known as pulse wave modulation. Their power source is either all the way on, or all the way off, binary in other words. It pulses at a high rate of speed. What you do is the faster you want the motor to go, the more on pulses you have. Works great, you have a simple design that provides a fine level of speed control. Only down side is the motor whines at the frequency of the pulse.
Now this was applied to audio as well. What you do is convert the PCM data on the CD to a much higher frequency 1-bit PWM stream. That then controls the analogue voltage. It ends up working great, so good in fact that sony has a new system called Sony Direct Stream Digital that just takes and stores the PWM data directly. This type of converter is called a Delta-Sigma D/A converter and is basically the only kind used any more. You may CD consumer equipemnt, espically older stuff (Sony Discmans did it a lot), occasionaly advertise it as "1-bit D/A".
Binary systems are just simpler to implement in electronics, hence we do. It is at higher levels that they start representing data with multiple states.
no more need to install light kits. your computer will produce its own creepy, high-tech glow.
I need a fibre comcast connection to my house, not a 20ghz processor from intel.
You've got "twat" twice. Spoiled the effect.
sig under development
Finally, someone with a brain is reading slashdot
would answer your question before you even asked the question. google: 2,000,000 pages queried in -0.2 seconds
New Codename: Ricer
To Alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
Heat will probably be a problem. Since you're dealing with photonic crystals, a small change (a few angstroms) in size (heat related) will change the optical properties of the device dramatically. But light doesn't heat up materials quite as dramatically as rapidly switching MOSFETS. And you don't get waste tunneling currents at small sizes either. So you can make better device. However, you CAN'T actually overclock, you'll mess up the optical properties of the device severely if you switch to different frequencies (turning a diffraction pattern that indicates an OR into an AND, for instance).
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
Ever taken an electrical engineering class?
I, for one, welcome our new photon overlords.
G-Force music visualization
People want things (software, movies, etc.) that they own and and can use when they want to. Putting out lots of bits quickly makes server-run programs more convenient but not much better for the users. Someone else still controls your ability to use the software and applications you paid for - when you can use, it, for what you can use it, and the output of the use. This model benefits content providers (loss in piracy, income by rental could be higher, no outside people hacking your software) but not necessarily individuals. Pricing might make it more attractive, but the lack of control that factors into other media distributed similarly such as music (tangentially or otherwise) is still a major issue.
I think that a "subscription model" of software has been in MS's eyes for quite some time - besides the lack of high-speed connections, I don't think their market has been overly receptive. I don't disagree with your point, but considering the hostility of the market towards this kind of restriction, speed isn't the only factor in its adoption.
Just grit up the alignment. Or hit 'em with a shockwave.
Shit, does this mean I have to listen to that Megahertz Myth crap again? Or will it be the Light Speed Lie now?
And before you all plotz, chill. I'm an Apple man myself.
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
But the article was about communications, not logic. What if we had broadband optical fiber transmission, where a single pulse has, say, 128 frequency levels that could be gated? Sure, you'd have to have an array of controls on both ends, but it would be linear (N gates for N levels) and in fact, this is part of the significance of Intel's announcement. They claim the gates can be made more cheaply in masked silicon wafers instead of the more expensive current technology, and that's reasonable.
They claim a 2 ghz clock cycle on the gating; imagine a light pipe transmitting 128-bit words at that rate. That's a fat pipe.
paranoia, anybody?
Wouldnt the speed that you can achieve using optical chips be limited to the speeds that you can transmit/interpret the optics? I dont see how that could make things any faster seeming how the speed of the reciever portion of the chip would be bounded by the same laws of current chips, and thus would be limited to the same speed as existing chips.
Unless there have been actual optical logic gates designed (ie two optical sources going into a single non-electric device that will only output a single value (bounded by and/or/xor/xand theory), I dont see how this can increase speed.
Actually the speed of electronic signals in a metal is the speed of light in that material. Light is fastest in a vacuum, so it's slower in all other materials, but it's still the speed of light. Or electromagnetic radiation, to be generic.
The speed of the electrons themselves is miniscule, we're talking about the signal.
Well it will most likely be used for some cluster computing, if the price is right someone will no doubt make software for it. Even if that someone is Intel. When the advantages are so high (less need for caching) people always MAKE these things work.
...seem really unhappy about Joe Six-Pack getting his hands on a 3,000,000,000-cycle-per-second general purpose computer for about the price of a dishwasher.
I've never been quite sure why.
Sorry to have to say this, but the inane responses to this article prove that Slashdot needs to implement kill files.
Can i get a cookie? Please, pretty please. :-) Give a cookie to the poor lazy boy ok?
After reading the article, it turns out that *all* this hoo-ha is about the fact that INtel has worked out how do do telecommunications level optical switching (read LED-LASER-RAPID-BLINKING) on a chip built using "normal" chip fabrication techniques.
This is in no way about "faster CPUs" it's ALL about "now we can fabricate telecomms equipment using standard CPU techniques, so they'll be cheaper and therefore easier to put into devices".
So you're not likely to be getting significantly faster PCs from this technology, though it *does* make more likely the chance of (one day) having a direct gigabit fiber port on your PDA (or digital camera/other-small-electronics-device)
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
like the sun!
The nature paper
Hey bozo's:
If you RTFA, you'll find that the above, although pretty lame, is pretty much on-topic and all the effusive comments about processors (most of the comments I've read so far) are far more off-topic.
Is that second "for" supposed to be there?
Hooked on Photonics worked for me!
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
This question is not off-topic. They talk about being able to do optical switching at consumer prices.
So the immediate question that I have is, "Why would I, a consumer, want that?" One possible answer is that I have fiber to my house.
Short of that, why would I want it? Would I want to convert my existing network to optical. Nope, I want less wires instead of more wires. One of the quotes even talks about people being able to watch multiple views of the Superbowl.
No, the mod that said this was on topic is full of crap.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
Not even LEDs are 100% efficient. However, for an optical system, the heat production is related to the duty cycle of the lamps, rather than the switching speed, so the heat production should remain constant regardless of clock speed.
That's true of the heat production in the guts of the lamp itself (at a given light intensity). But there are other factors.
On the one hand, this means you don't need to improve cooling to overclock. On the other, it means that you can't improve the overclock level with improved cooling.
Most of the heat loss in a circuit comes from the I-squared-R losses of the currents needed to charge and discharge the stray capacatance of the wiring (even the tiny traces on the ICs) and the space-charge of the devices.
In particular, if the wire has any significant length, you need to run that current through a series resistance (at least at the driving end) matching the impedence of the wire, in order to produce a nice waveshape at the far end and prevent "ringing" as the signal bounces back-and-forth (which would degrade the waveshape at the inputs to far-end gates and make the signal both more sensitive to noise AND more generative of noise to interfere with its neighbors.)
With CMOS you only pull power (except leakage power) when you CHANGE the state of a signal. But when you do, you have to charge, or discharge, the signal wiring through that matched resistance. The impedence of the wiring doesn't change a lot with technology and speed. So with a given length of wire, you have a given amount of energy dropped every time you switch it. Switch it twice as fast, generate twice as many pulses of heat.
New generations of semiconductors fight this in three ways:
- Shrink the components (so they have less stray capacatance to charge and discharge).
- Shorten the signal runs by making the components smaller so they can be closer together (reducing the stray capacatance of the lines). (But this doesn't help for signals that HAVE to cross the chip, or leave it.)
- Lower the power supply voltage (so you don't have to swing it as far. Current goes up with the the voltage, heat loss with the square of the current.) (For signals that leave the chip this may be harder to do than for signals that stay on it - due to external interference.)
For switching a light-emitting device you still have to charge and discharge the capacatance of the device itself and the wiring to it. Switch it faster and IT doesn't heat up much more. But the driver circuit does.
By putting a light modulator on the chip, Intel's new technology wins in two ways:
- You don't have to rapidly switch the power to the laser (which involves switching a LOT of current through an impedence-matching resistor).
- You don't have to run a microwave-speed signal through a long resistive wire, which degrades its waveshape and also produces still more losses.
Instead you switch a low-power, short-range, on-chip wire to a low-capacatance active region on the on-chip modulator. Switching losses are relatively small, comparable to those of a gate-to-gate internal signal in the same chip.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"It will free computer designers to think about the systems they create in new ways, making it possible to conceive of machines that are not located in a single physical place, according to scientists and industry executives."
Ok is it just me or has anyone else thought of the possibilities behind this statement? It could mean a few things but what rings for me is the end of the "personal" computer and the beginning of the "personal computing" service. Where The HP's and Dell's etc of the world keep all the systems while you purchase their own branded access to the system. Essentially you don't have a computer any longer but only client access. The end result is still much the same for all intents and puposes but no longer a physical system sitting on your desk. Like Citrix, VNC or rdesktop on crack.
That idea could be way out to lunch but all the same I can't say I really care for it. Hmm...
I was thinking, if they use light, than the limitation on the size of the chip will disappear (or become less important, rather) and you could have a chip big enough so that you can actually see how it works. Wouldn't that be cool?
Same concept is now being applied to amplifiers. Class-D amplifiers, sometimes called digital amplifiers (the D doesn't mean digital actually) do this. They are quite simple and cheap to build and really efficient, even more than Class-B amps and don't suffer from crossover distortion. However, thus far, I am unaware of any made at a high enough frequency for full range speakers (you need something in excess of 2mhz to sound good). Right now they are religated to subwoofers, but are quite popular in that arena.
That TI hack just made the out port into a Class-D amp, albeit probably a poor one.
The cool thing will be if they can be scaled to full range it would make for amps that could directly accept digital signals and amplify them. Quite a boon for stage work at the very least.
MOD PARENT THRU THE ROOF!
In fact the signal on such a wire will tend to hang around at about the level it was last driven for quite a while (the wire is a cap) untill it discharges or some other gate drives it.
In fact internal wires that are genuinely tristate are considered evil in most chip deigns - a floating signal will tend to turn on both the transistors in the gate(s) being driven causing current to flow where it shouldn't (one should be on or the other not both) - chips with internal floating nodes can et into horrible lockupstate which cause thermal runnaway and chip death. Normally if you are using tristate circuits you have a resistor to pull the wire to a known value when not in use, a weak 'keeper' transistor, a protocol which makes sure that someone is always driving them or a combination (PCI is a great example where all the bus clients know whow's driving each wire at any time and when wires are released they are first driven to a safe keeper voltage and then released so a weak resistor can hold them)
because, uhm, i thought like they might be really fancy and stuff?
(he-he, "if you had infrared vision, you could see through silicon"... suckers)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Intel has to present itself as the leader in processing/computing so that their stock price can go up so that mutual funds companies can make a zillian bucks so that less than 0.01% of the population can realize +30% return on their investment dollar.
Yeah, I'm ranting but alot of smart people in a number of different labs have done alot to advanced optical computing/modulation/switching. And has Intel done anything particularly different or new? Probably not. Is this the first time you heard a company as big as Intel talk semi-seriously about optical computing or the like? More than likely. I would bet the only reason Intel released this article is to say they've done something in the field. To have some return of investment from the millions that Intel Venture Capital(something like that) dished out to start-up optical companies (that failed) a few years ago. Don't forget the mom and pop optical companies Intel bought around the same time. They need to show they are doing something with them or write them off at a loss.
Now, Intel can do some wonderful things with optical technologies using the core business that they are in - - fabrication. I bet anybody could find hundreds of papers written about 'chip speed' and 'optical switching' but the real trick is making the circuits and thats where Intel could make a HUGE impact on the roll-out of optical computing. They have a lot of low 'class' (10 ppm) cleanroom space and the experience to implement it. Once Intel annouces break-throughs in optical fabrication, then mortgage the house and buy all the stock you can.
--Just a working but out-of-field Optical Engineer pushing electrons for the man.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 11 -- Intel scientists say that they have made silicon chips that can switch light like electricity, blurring the line between computing and communications and presenting a vision of the digital future that will allow computers themselves to span cities or even the entire globe.
Great! I was getting so tired of my computer being only 5lbs and man-portable! I can't wait for these new planet-sized computers. Mine's going to be called the Death Star.
Having not read the paper, it's hard to say how great this works, but it's worth mentioning that optical microchip clocking may be a major development over the coming decade. As clock speeds get faster (4GHz anyone?), small variations called clock skew and jitter become critical difficulties. Basically, because the clock signal doesn't propagate in an exactly predictable amount of time, different chip parts end up out of sync. Because optical clocking would rely on waveguides, with faster transmission and using uncharged particles that don't pick up random electrical signals, sending clock signals via light waves could be very beneficial. Of course, this development only speaks of the sending end - the modulator - not the receiving end, but we can be sure that Intel and many others are hard at work developing this technology.
Why would intel NOT clock their chips as high as possible if temperature was not an issue? The only reason they don't currently ship overclocked chips is that standard heatsinks can't deal with the heat.
Photos.
"Intel plans on demonstrating a working system transmitting a movie in high-definition television over a five-mile coil of fiberoptic cable next week"
This sounds like what I have dreamed of. I'd like one really, really nice projector in my house that goes into a fiber optic distribution system, redirecting the signal to one of say 6 places in the house.
So, I spend $6,000 on a nice projector, which stays in one place, and with the push of a button I can "move" the signal from the living room to the bedroom, or downstairs to the theater.
Ahhh, how would it be?
Anyone else notice that this guy's last name, Paniccia, is earily close to the English word 'panacea' ?
:-P
I thought there were no panaceas in the world. Or maybe Intel is hoping for one with this research
[move
Speed of light in copper: 2*10^8 m/s
Speed of light in vacuum: 3*10^8 m/s
The processors can get roughly 50% faster.
Big deal...
and watch the blinking lights.
...imagine a Beowulf cluster of THOSE.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
X will finally be usable!!!
:>)
(note: Smile it's a joke, I have an xterm to our server running as I type.)
I hope that with the coming breakthroughs in cheaper fiber optic/scilicon chips, we can finally get really fast/cheap internet access (with fiber into the house) at realistic rates...(no more 2 gig(or inthe case of Telus here in canada) what, 5 gigs a month data caps?)????????? One can only hope....
Intels future is so bright, they need sun glasses!
Now we will be able to read a book by the light of the CPU as well as that of the screen....
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
God, I can't believe you morons didn't notice the Sagan quote. What more does he have to do, brand "TROLL!" on your mothers' foreheads?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
...barrier to building fundamentally new kinds of computers not limited by physical distance should become a reality, experts say...
I was under the impression that physical distance was always a limitation...? Which "experts" are saying this?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
To make a gate that can handle more than one state, you need more than units than states. I mean, I can implement a binary gate really simply, just a single transistor. How would you implement a trinary gate? TRy and design something more simple (taht can be designed on silicon). Also remember that it needs to be usable in the end. This means that:
1) It needs to be usable in the end. Binary is simple, when voltage is present, it causes something to happen, another gate to flip, a value in a memory circut to be set or unset, etc. With a larger set of states you again need more circutry to be able to differentiate one state from another which again increases complexity more than gain.
2) Be able to keep the states consistent. IT's easy with binary, on or off, voltage present or absent. With more states it gets hard, how is one defined from teh next, and what happens if the input voltage changes (which does happen) and changes the amount flowing through. I mean if the voltage sas for a second, does that throw off all calculations? Computers are imperitive devices. It is necessiary that one stage be able to rely on the fact that the result of the prior stage was correct.
3) As I mentioned, you need to be able to implement it on a silicon chip. YOu might be able to get some complex device that daels with a bunch of potentiometres and count those as "gates" but you'd be forgetting that they aren't implementable on silicon as a transistor is. Thus you get nothing workable in teh end.
Look, you're welcome to try and design a higher state chip, but I'll give good odds that you don't get anything even near working. IF you like, I'll run the idea past the EEs at work, but I already know what they are going to say.
Now quantum computers are entirely different. They solve problems in a whole different way and, indeed, work on a different level than conventional computers. But for the normal silicon chips, you are stuck with binary. Nothing else can be made workable.
Soon we will be able to Slashdot at the speed of light! Evil laugh>
It is fairly uncommon to find transmissions over long distances that are just simple on-off pulses. Even modesms don't do that, and haven't for a long time. They came to find out that 300bps is about the max you can do with simple on-off signaling. So faster modems use more complex modulations that heve multiple different tones and amplitude levels.
On the newest and most abstract level we see DWDM fibre transmissions. This takes multiple signals at different fewquencies of light (the individual transmissions which are usualy more than simple on/off) and multiplexes the singal over a single fibre.
None of that bears any relation to processing on silicon chips.
I think this technology will be more readily useful in the telecommunicatiosn industry rather than the Computer industry. For computers, their still a decade or more away from using this in any practical way because of issues with light sources, head and miniturization or complex "light" circuits. It'd be infinitly more applicable to fibre transmission. Using this, they can boost signal throught he fibre at a low latency cost because it's solid state and nothign mechnical is needed, also this will allow direct light rerouting instead of a clumsy light->electron signlal->light like they do now. It might make switching faster because all the logical operatiosn are done with light, and you could use it to boost light signals at less cost. This means networks that use fibre with this type of circuit as endpoitns can do so at higher frequencies and thus have higher bandwidth. This would mean Distance would mean even less to computers, maybe making better distributed computing solutions.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Didn't someone have a project based on this already?
I think AMD's naming makes a lot of clueful people a bit uncomfortable, but seems justifiable in a market dominated by a world-class bullshit artist like Intel.
Actually, AMD is as much to blame for the "megahertz myth" as anyone else is.
Remember that it was AMD that was so eager to engage in the great clock speed race. When AMD was the one who had the faster clock speeds, it was their PR that went on and on about the so-called "gigahertz era".
And since this was before the days of the P4, Intel's x86 CPUs
had more processing power clock-for-clock than AMD's.
If the "megahertz myth" is indeed damaging AMD in the marketplace, then it is largely due to their own shortsighted PR department.
And finally, note that Intel as least has been consistent in the naming of their consumer products. A 1.6 GHz Pentium-M is more capable than a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4. But Intel does not play fancy numerical name games. They tell you the architecture brand name, the clock speed, and the FSB speed of the chip. And those are the distinguishing characteristics. When I see a 2400+ Athlon on sale at Fry's, it's much obvious to a casual consumer like myself where it stands in the AMD family tree.
I found the following little study here. Read on:
/*
As part of my study of Operating Systems and embedded systems, one of
the things I've been looking at is compilers. I'm interested in
analyzing how different compilers optimize code for different
platforms. As part of this comparison, I was looking at the Intel
Compiler and how it optimizes code. The Intel Compilers have a free
evaluation download from here:
http://www.intel.com/products/software/inde x.htm?i id=Corporate+Header_prod_softwr&#compilers
One of the things that the version 8.0 of the Intel compiler included
was an "Intel-specific" flag. According to the documentation, binaries
compiled with this flag would only run on Intel processors and would
include Intel-specific optimizations to make them run faster. The
documentation was unfortunately lacking in explaining what these
optimizations were, so I decided to do some investigating.
First I wanted to pick a primarily CPU-bound test to run, so I chose
SPEC CPU2000. The test system was a P4 3.2G Extreme Edition with 1 gig
of ram running WIndows XP Pro. First I compiled and ran spec with the
"generic x86 flag" (-QxW), which compiles code to run on any x86
processor. After running the generic version, I recompiled and ran
spec with the "Intel-specific flag" (-QxN) to see what kind of
difference that would make. For most benchmarks, there was not very
much change, but for 181.mcf, there was a win of almost 22% !
Curious as to what sort of optimizations the compiler was doing to
allow the Intel-specific version to run 22% faster, I tried running
the same binary on my friend's computer. His computer, the second test
machine, was an AMD FX51, also with 1 gig of ram, running Windows XP
Pro. First I ran the "generic x86" binaries on the FX51, and then
tried to run the "Intel-only" binaries. The Intel-specific ones
printed out an error message saying that the processor was not
supported and exited. This wasn't very helpful, was it true that only
Intel processors could take advantage of this performance boost?
I started mucking around with a dissassembly of the Intel-specific
binary and found one particular call (proc_init_N) that appeared to be
performing this check. As far as I can tell, this call is supposed to
verify that the CPU supports SSE and SSE2 and it checks the CPUID to
ensure that its an Intel processor. I wrote a quick utility which I
call iccOut, to go through a binary that has been compiled with this
Intel-only flag and remove that check.
Once I ran the binary that was compiled with the Intel-specific flag
(-QxN) through iccOut, it was able to run on the FX51. Much to my
surprise, it ran fine and did not miscompare. On top of that, it got
the same 22% performance boost that I saw on the Pentium4 with an
actual Intel processor. This is very interesting to me, since it
appears that in fact no Intel-specific optimization has been done if
the AMD processor is also capable to taking advantage of these same
optimizations. If I'm missing something, I'd love for someone to point
it out for me. From the way it looks right now, it appears that Intel
is simply "cheating" to make their processors look better against
competitor's processors.
Links:
Intel Compiler:http://www.intel.com/products/software/in dex.htm?iid=Corporate+Header_prod_softwr&#compiler s
Here is the text:
* iccOut 1.0
*
* This program enables programs compiled with the intel compiler
using the
* -xN flag to run on non-intel processors. This can sometimes result
in
* large performance increases, depending on the application. Note
that even
* though the check will be removed, the CPU runni
what is keeping America afloat?
is a good question
The 8.2% third quarter growth was purchased on credit-the $374 billion budget deficit that was the largest in the country's history. All indications are that next year's deficit will be even larger, exceeding half a trillion dollars.
Any idiot with a hand full of credit cards charged to the next generation's children can gin up the short term illusion of prosperity. Until, that is, the bills come due.
George W. Bush inherited a $127 billion fiscal surplus but ran through all of that and more in his first year. He has turned a $5.6 trillion 10 year forecast surplus into a $3+ trillion forecast loss-an almost unimaginable reversal of $9 trillion in only three years.
The result of this almost psychotic profligacy, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will be a national debt of $14 trillion in 10 years. Interest payments alone will approach a trillion dollars a year and will exceed spending for all discretionary federal programs combined.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0105-08.htm
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I guess you got your answer, dickwad.
You know, maybe you are right. And I think we should also stop counting in base-10. I mean, we've been doing that for, like, forever. And it would be so cool to count in base-13.
:-)
Integer bases are so mundane. Innovative folks use base pi, and Real Men(tm) use base e.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So what, are we supposed to cry on your petty vacation-less life ?
Move to Europe, where you can earn money, have a social life, vacations (paid!) + social security advantages. And every one will find it natural that your are not overly exploited.
Of course, you won't have the right to bring your guns, KKK toilet litterature and you'll have to learn a proper langage, but it might be worth it...for you I mean...
You are not happy with your present situation ? MOVE YOUR ASS!
----
Europeans... We created Australia by sending there the prostitutes and the bandits we caught here en masse...The lower scrub had already been used to colonize America !
it's internally consistent anyway, even if it doesn't make much sense. that may be all that's required for a system to work, though. obviously you wouldn't do all of this conversion, you'd just hardwire it.
AMD comes out with a nice 64 bit CPU, Intel takes their highest end 32bit CPU, repackages it for a desktop, at twice the price, and barely competes.
AMD's 64 bit solution looks to beat the pants off of Itanium... Intel's statement that they're working on an x86 64 bit CPU says everything we need to know.
Sun partners with AMD - smartest move they could have made, especially if they jointly develop the next generation of AMD CPUs. Can we say massively SMP processing added to a fast core?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
According to this , Star Trek computers have subspace switchign and communication, thereby operating much faster than light speed.
The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem gives the relationship between bandwidth and sampling frequency. If you sample a bandlimited signal at twice the bandwidth, you can reconstruct the signal exactly, and vice versa, if you set up the signal properly you can get any set of samples.
HOWEVER (and this is a common misunderstanding) both the signal and the samples are fundamentally analog phenomena. If you digitize the sample to just 2 states, you get one bit per sample. If you measure to 1024 states, you get 10 bits per sample. There is no theoretical limit to the bitrate that you can get from a band-limited analog signal. There are, obviously, practical limits. But describing a bitrate in terms of the bandwidth of an analog signal involves a serious misunderstanding of the theory, and the actual digital capacity that you get from a signal depends on more than just the bandwidth.
Therefore your "correction" is incorrect. Capacity and bandwidth are strongly correlated, but they are not the same thing.
Interesting, so now we have TWO big breakthroughs in how to make electronics in the future. photonics and
spintronics.
Photonics or spintronics, any experts willing to guess which will be the dominant technology in the future?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Does anyone know if this is an electrically controlled optical transiter optical controled transiter? I am assuming it is optically controled which means that IP traffic could be routed with out be convert back to electrons for a decision to be made. OPTICAL SWITCH!
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
What is the switching time for these "electricty/light" switches? It's very cool that you can "switch light like you switch electricity", but for this to be especially useful will require a switching time/frequency that is very very fast. So, naturally I'm curious about this time/frequency.
~ kjrose
It's good to see my old boss in the news. I worked for Mario in 1999-2000 as a snot-nosed intern, doing some work on their through-backplane transcievers and modulators. Because silicon is transparent at infrared wavelengths, you can see right though the chip if the base is thin enough. Add to that the idea that the electron density changes in the gate region of a FET as it switches, and, well, there you go. :) This technology has the potential to go MUCH MUCH faster than a measly 2GB/s.
Anyway, the group I was in consisted of ten PhD's and me, a sophomore. The level of output of that one group was amazing, and I'm pleased to see the technology they worked on for so long start to take off.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
I agree. My point was that heat is an issue that a user can change. It's something you can mod. One cannot mod the chip itself however!
Photos.
I can't believe how many people jump on anything to do with Intel or AMD and turn it into flame wars about cpus. This story is about optical comm gear breakthoughs and has NOTHING to do with processors.
I thought that bell labs came up with this technology first. Is this just spin?
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
How in the holy hell is this a Troll? I was serious.
As I understand it, you won't have the photonic capabilities that you're talking about. You will still be dealing with binary semiconductors, so multiplex all you like, if they don't get switched at the gate they aren't involved in the computation. Different wavelengths will be switched exactly the same. (I think)
Here is a link to the Nature article (sorry if this is a repost). You can't print the article, so you must use your PDF cracking skills to turn on the print ability.
Intel researchers have developed a silicon-based optical modulator operating at 1GHz an increase of over 50 times the previous research record of about 20MHz. Their technological breakthrough was announced in a paper," (.pdf, 233KB), in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. Fabricated in an Intel Fab using Intel's existing high-volume manufacturing processes, the device incorporates a transistor-like structure to encode data onto a wavelength of light.
The original report on this research was published in Nature, Volume 428 dated 12 February. A copy of the paper and more information about Intel's silicon photonics research can be found here.
Take here: the Americans have it better: they work more hours, and the Europeans if anything think that the Americans should work fewer!
I mean, work is good, so more work is better, right?
Wikileaks, no DNS