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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
that it will have to be x86 compatible, or it will never fly.
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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.
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.
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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?
"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
...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
Given the current press reports from the White House and David Kay, how do we know we can trust this intel?
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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.
He said he was "Bond, James Bond"..then ordered a martini.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Flourescent and LED lights do generate heat, just not to the same order of magnitude as incadescent lights. Its significantly less, which I specifically mentioned in the post! However there is still some heat generated. If you place a lot of LED lights together though then they can generate enough heat as to become significant.
Fluorescent and LED lights do not get hot.
Sure they do. They are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs, so they produce significantly less heat per lumen, but a very bright fluorescent or LED light can get quite hot.
In fact, high-brightness LEDs like the Luxeon Star have to be mounted on heat sinks to keep them from burning up.
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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.
temperature, is really not the problem. The problem is stabilization. Different gates "stabilize" that is produce consitant output high or low at different rates, gates are strung together into circuits on the chip and thouse circuits then take a certain amount of time to stabilize, this is critical because the output of one circuit will be the input to another be it on the same IC or interfacing with something else. The reason you can overclock is in most cases ICs in computers the CPU in particular are underclocked to begin with. The clock cycle is longer then the stabiliation time when the chip is cool. However the voltage running though the traces and the swiches meets some resistence and part of it is disipated as heat, when silicon-eletric gates heat the respond slower and the stabilization time becomes longer, so the clock cycle must be longer if you want correct output. This is why if you take special meausers to keep the chip cooler you can often run it faster. Fiberoptics are not perfect and can heat too, the smaller you make them that problem is likely to exacerbate. The question I can't answer for you is wether that is a problem at all. silicon-optic gates may not vary in stabilization time in the same way that the electric counter parts do? They may and then the same rules apply or they could have some optimal temp where a cold chip does not work as well as a warm one? It might be they work perfectly up to a certain failure point?
I would love some answers form an engineer who is working with this stuff.
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Um, that might not be wise. If you try to overclock past the speed of light, I think that will cause a rift in the Time/Space Continuum. :P
"Fluorescent and LED lights do not get hot."
This is not true. They do get hot, just not as hot. They don't require as much energy to generate light.
With that said, the question really can only be answered after we know about the design of the chip. If all the light emitting aspects of the chip can be run at full intensity without ever being turned off, and the chip can survive that, then the answer is yes, you can overclock it to the max without it burning out. Will the chips work that way? Well I don't know. We are talking about very small components.
His question was quite valid.
"Derp de derp."
probably the same person that modded yours informative. You are incorrect regarding fluorescents. I can't speak to diodes, but I have known them to be quite hot (such as in a rectifier) so I have doubts about that as well.
Fluorescents DO get hot, as do the ballasts (see post below). I just got done in the lab measuring different ballast systems that use high frequency to energize high output fluorescent lamps. Current generation systems are twice as efficient as older systems by using HF but they still are hot as hell. The ambient temperature of a 100 watt fluorescent lamp, powered by only 65 watts of power (typical cpu power) at high frequency has an ambient temperature of over 100F at 6cm away. The surface temperature is over 212F (100C).
So yes, fluorescents DO get hot. They just produce alot more light per BTU of waste heat, but still hot.
Another problem: fluorescents are plasma devices, similar to neon signs. This means they operate in a semi vacuum (1% of atmosphere), with the electrical fields generated causing an outer electron of the mercury atom to fly off toward the positive end of the lamp, and strike the phosphor coating of the lamp. This reduces the energy in the electron, which then is captured by any mercury atom with an electron missing, thus with a positive charge. This is not a practical solution inside a integrated circuit. This isn't even including the other problems I mentioned in the other post, such as ballasting.
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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.
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.
This is much better than early forays into this technology by AMD where the heatsink would fall off of the processor & the resultant heat would generate the light.
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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).
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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 will add to the other responses that LEDs are quite inefficient. LEDs are not much more efficient than incadescent lamps. We use large arrays of LEDs for special copier devices. They have about 500 LEDs in an 8x10 array, and they get too hot to touch on the interior. They get hotter than hell. Their prime selling point is their longevity. That's why they are being used in automobiles and traffic control devices.
Fluorescent lamps with high efficiency ballasts are much more efficient than either incadescent or LEDs by orders of magnitudes. That's why they are THE ideal choice for all interior lighting. People that complain about the color temperature of fluorescents are ignorant of the fact that their are a number of choices available other than "office" temperature. Guests in my home are surprised to find that all lighting in my house is fluorescent. You'll be surprised how many people still don't realize that those fixtures down at the Home Despot have a tone that is very close to incadescent bulbs.
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)
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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.
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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.
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"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?
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)
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.
...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?
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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.
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.
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
When is it that one thinks 'okay, I have enough porn now' ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.