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IBM Debuts Optical Transceiver Chipset
IBM debuted a new optical transceiver chipset today that researchers within the company promise will allow users to download data eight times faster than current technology. IBM cited the rising demand for digital media such as movies as the driving force behind the new technology. "IBM says it can meet that need, building its new chipset by making an optical transceiver with standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, and combining that with optical components crafted from exotic materials such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The resulting package is just 3.25mm by 5.25mm in size, small enough to be integrated onto a printed circuit board."
Q: Who funded the startup of the companies in the
A: Federal technology grants (taxpayers), government backed low interest loans to encourage growth in that industry (taxpayers), and 401(k) contributors (working class taxpayers).
Q: Where did all the profit go?
A: Upper echelons.
Q: Does that sound like a pyramid scheme?
A: Yes.
Q: Why is this comment modded troll?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
If you want to see what it looks like, it was already featured here. The thing's damn small...
...and the Survey that 29% of US households dont see a need for an internet connection couldnt have been better timed. Anyone else find this slightly ironic?
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Optoisolation.
[...] will allow users to download data eight times faster than current technology.
The MPAA was not available for comment.
Trolling is a art,
will allow users to download data eight times faster than current
using the awesome power of slashdot it'll be possible to bring down servers at eight times the speed!
On a slightly serious note.. try asking your ISP what their contention ratio is, and their actual bandwidth at their peering points. chances are they won't tell you much detail. In practise they depend on their subscribers not trying to all max out their lines at once which is why P2P is hated by ISPs. Except for the really big companies, many organisations are probably not hosted or colocated with more than 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s anyway due to cost.
IBM tech promises 160Gb/s downloads
Net speed is nice, but I think these would also make excellent replacements for SATA. Especially when we get those nifty zero-seek time solid state flash drives. Currently, a SATA cable tops out at 3GB/s.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Next, we need some nifty means of printing/etching/plating optical traces on PCBs. An OGA (Optical Grid Array) would interface chips to board which would route the light to other chips.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Hardly. Practically every device that communicates wirelessly at microwave frequencies has GaAs amplifiers. This includes most cell phones and wireless cards.
From this writeup, I'm having a hard time seeing h ow this differs significantly from an LED. What am I missing?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Anyone else think the arguments against Net Neutrality just got a little weaker?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That transceiver is good for 160Gbps, in 2010, when it might be for sale.
Meanwhile, what do you do when you need more than 10Gbps? Stuff a PCIe bus with 2x10Gbps boards? Spend a $million on an experimental 100Gbps transceiver?
It's weird that there seems to be $10 1Gig-e, $450 10Gig-e, $750 2x10Gig-e, and then... nothing. Since even PlayStations include 1Gig-e, surely the horizon isn't really just 10x that speed?
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make install -not war
A PC using that board would be able to reduce the download time of a typical high-definition feature-length movie from 30 minutes to one second, the company said.
That's nice, but I don't know of anyone able to provide me with that movie in one second, much less anyone with the bandwidth to receive it (or write it to disk) that quickly. The bottleneck in my downloading experience sure as hell doesn't exist within my beige box.
Will this actually be useful for anything in 2010?
Coming up next: researchers have been able to fit seven octillion Libraries of Congress within a tube the size of a small dog.
What four-letter word best describes what this technology will be used to access?
"data"
What?
"Sorry, can't stop - have to take my seven octillion Libraries of Congress for a walk".
Nice work. But they are merely taking state of the commercial state of the art (10 Gbit/sec) and muxing 16 together. Not a radical leap, a tricky packaging job no doubt.
-entropyfoe
I actually read (quickly) TFA, and I don't see how this is useful at all for the applications they're envisioning. In a high-performance data center or supercomputer cluster, sure, 160 Gbps links might be quite useful. But for connecting homes to the internet? Sorry, I don't see it.
For one thing, this technology is far faster than anything we already have, or what anyone is demanding. Add up a fast internet connection, VoIP, and a few TV channels in HD, and you still don't come close to needing 160 Gbps. We already have optical networks developed for connecting homes to these services, and they're nearing deployment. Their name is PON, or passive optical network. This FA doesn't give any details of this 160 Gbps stuff, but can it travel 60 km without any amplification? That's basically a requirement for economically deploying fiber to peoples' homes. Just because a particular fiber-optic technology may be useful for some applications, like short point-to-point links, doesn't mean it's useful for extremely long-distance use as may be the case for residential use.
PON is already here and developed; it supports TV, voice, and data with a 2.4 Gbps downstream rate (1.2 up). What would we ever need 160 Gbps for within the next 20-30 years? Just how many Blu-Ray discs do you need to transfer at once?
It will take just one second to download a complete HD movie.
I think I can survive with waiting 8 seconds to download a movie (it will take me 90+ minutes to watch it anyway).
So I'll be looking to buy up some of the "old" cards when people toss them out to upgrade to these new cards.
At 160Gb/s, each bit is about 1mm long in the fiber. The dispersion of a fiber will smear away the eye in a kilometer. Using zero dispersion fiber causes problems with DWDM, so this may only be usable in a data center.
Since bundles 10Gb/s X 16 are available as single plug, there will be little practical difference for users unless it is cheaper than the 10Gb/s X 16 bundles.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Your very optimistic. Of course, who ever posts that first copy of a movie that everyone references will be hit with a billion dollar lawsuit by the MPAA. They would scream bloody murder if it got even easier for people to collaborate. The biggest opponent to that Utopian ideology is going to be businesses and the conspiracy theorists.
Nortel JDS
Somehow its news if IBM does it? Ask Nortel and JDS, the market just is not there. Though perhaps they can flog their warehouses full of this stuff at IBM, if IBM thinks the telco's are willing to replace the copper network with fiber. (fat chance)
And who is going to lay fiber to my house? They've been talking about it since 1989. It's not going to happen. The cable company won't even lay coax out here. (and I'm only a 20 minute drive from an urban center).
Fiber to the home? I'll believe it when I see it, and I doubt I ever will. (And no, prototype communities don't count. It must be as ubiquitous as copper is today.)
I don't see how this is going to make my cable connection run any faster, which is the only part of downloading movies faster that would have any effect on me.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually, it was the citizens, not the taxpayers, that funded this. Money is collected by the government as representatives of the citizenry. Your right to control the government comes not from the money you pay into it; it comes from being a citizen.
I pay a solid middle class share of my taxes - it shouldn't give me any more say than the guy who makes nothing, or any less than the guy who pays ten times what I do.
Of course, as a DC resident, I am a second class citizen.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Those links together are collectively known as a bus, though everyone knows it's switched. Because, like ethernet through a switch, it is used like a bus, though many bus problems are solved by the switch.
That's the reality. If you insist on dogmatism, you can get off the bus, and lose track of the actual use of these technologies.
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make install -not war
For throughput I wonder it that kind of speed could rival the traditional copper busses on motherboards.