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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
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.
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.
"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
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?
...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.
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.
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 love generalization.
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.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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.
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
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
New Codename: Ricer
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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
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
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.
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