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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.'"
So when do I get my new high-speed fiber line? :D
... 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.
I love generalization.
Three states have been around awhile it's called Tri-state Logic. Gordon Moore gave an interview in PC Magazine. He discussed multi-state logic, but said it was a non issue. He said that neural networks were much more important breakthrough.
Actually Intel's behavior in this regard is far worse than AMD's.
With AMD, the bullshit is just a thin (and obvious) marketing layer, which is easy enough to ignore. Intel, on the other hand, release slow chips with high clock speeds because they know the vast majority of morons out there will only pay attention to the MHz rating.
As a case in point, the infamous P4 Celeron. High-ish clock speed, crap performance, completely destroyed by similarly priced AMD processors.
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.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Sorry, accidentally posted anonymously the first time:
The limitation on physical distance in an electrical medium is dictated by its impedance, which dissipates the electrical energy in the form of heat. This creates an enormous problem of power loss, which increases linearly with the distance of the transmission line.
An optical waveguide, such as fiber or the silicon waveguides mentioned in the article, see no such losses due to electrical impedance.
Theoretically, as long as the parameters are met for photonic propagation, light will stay in the waveguide indefinitely. However, there are still losses due to imperfections and impurities in the medium itself, caused by microscopic deformities, bubbles, splices in the fiber, etc. There are also some losses dues to quantum effects, which we see in the form of 'evanescent' waves that tunnel outside of the boundaries of the waveguide.
What you really want to be asking is what is the transmissive and absorbtive properties for the silicon medium they use for the particular wavelength(s) of light that they are developing the technology with. If you know that, then combined with the effects above you can get a decent estimate of the power dissipation of the system for a given photon source.
My feeling, without performing the calculations, is that you will be pleasantly surprised at how little energy will be dissipated in the form of heat.
~Loren
Easiest way to see this is to imagine A and B have an instantaneous communication device. They synchronize their clocks and then separate at velocity v. Some time later (t1), A sends an instant message ("lol d00d") to B. Due to time dilation, A knows B will receive this message when his clock says t2, where t2 < t1. In B's frame, he receives this message when his clock says t2, and he instantly responds ("r0x0r!"). In B's frame, A is moving away at speed v, so the time that B knows is on A's clock when he receives his instant message is t3 < t2. But that means that A receives a response to his IM at t3 < t1, which is before he sent it!
So that rules out instant communication. If you redo this argument mathematically, but allow the speed of the communication to be a parameter, you can find a constraint on the speed of information exchange to preserve causality. It's not immediately obvious to me that it will come out to be the speed of light, though. I suspect that it should, or I'v made an error in setting up this thought experiment.
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.