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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.'"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who modded this insightful? Lamps are hot because that's how incadescent technology works. Fluorescent and LED lights do not get hot.
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.
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.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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.
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.
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.
I've never had a reliability issue with AMD, either on my laptop (Athlon XP 1600+ with barely-adequate cooling) or on my desktop (Athlon XP 2400+ where the heatsink has been changed twice, surely physically stressing the chip quite a bit). Having said that, I never had an issue with the dual P2 I had beforehand. Maybe I'm just lucky - or maybe I don't think it's some kind of god-given right to overclock my chips. Run them within spec and they'll be fine. Overclock them and, well, don't be surprised if they let you down.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
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.
"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 guess there's a happy medium somewhere in-between, eh?
I guess I see things a little differently since my mother and two of my aunts are teachers. My aunts both work in poorer school districts (despite living in very nice neighborhoods) and things are so bad that they are buying basic supplies out of their measly salery and trying to beg places to donate things like multiple copies of books so they can use them in study groups. Not to mention things like the gym roof that collapsed at one of their schools a couple years back. Disciplinary problems CAN eat a lot of a teachers time frivilously and you are right that lack of parental involvement is probably the biggest problem but lack of funds definitly makes it much more difficult then it needs to be.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Debt is different then deficit.
Debt is the accumulation of previous deficits.
A deficit is the net loss for a specific time period (say 1 year).
For example, the US may have had a $6B debt in 1999. But that year government expenditures where $100M less than revenue. Therefore they had a surplus.