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IBM Optical Chip Zips Huge Files Using Little Power

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the zip-without-the-zap dept.

An anonymous reader wrote to mention that IBM has unveiled a new prototype chip that can transmit data at up to 8 TB/sec, or about 5,000 high-def video streams. While this might not be entirely amazing, the fact that they did it using the same amount of juice required to light a 100-watt lightbulb, is. "The resulting total bi-directional data transfer rate is 300 Gb/s, nearly doubling the performance of a version IBM introduced last year. Compared to current commercial optical modules the transceiver provides 10-fold greater bandwidth in 1/10 the volume while consuming comparable power, IBM said."

28 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. So that would make it use about... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    100 watts? Anybody want to check my math?

    1. Re:So that would make it use about... by that+this+is+not+und · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They said the amount of juice to light a 100 watt bulb. Check it some time. You can reduce the voltage to half and get light out of a 100 watt bulb. So do they mean 100 watts? Or are they maybe driving with enough voltage that it consumes 800 watts for a short time? These clever journalistic/marketing phrases are vague.

    2. Re:So that would make it use about... by Chapter80 · · Score: 4, Funny
      Proper conversion:

      Start with a 100 Watt bulb

      Divide by 7, which is the number of watts necessary to properly illuminate a square foot of floor space.
      This gives roughly 14.28 square feet able to be illuminated.

      Divide this into 2.1 million sq ft, the amount of square feet in the Library of Congress (USLOC).
      This tells us that 147,000 watts are necessary to illuminate the US Library of Congress.

      Divide by 1.09951163 × 10^13 bytes, the amount of storage per unit of USLOC.
      This tells us that 1.33 x 10^-8 bytes are illuminated per watt

      Multiply by 7GB (7,516,192,768 bytes), which is the number of gigabytes of printed material that can be properly illuminated by a 1-watt bulb.

      Answer: 100.4

      So you were close.

    3. Re:So that would make it use about... by Chapter80 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Answer: 100.4

      So you were close.

      Oops, I used Excel, so don't trust my calculations. Never mind.
    4. Re:So that would make it use about... by maxwell+demon · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, they are speaking about amounts of juice, so the proper unit would be liter/second (or gallons/second for you Americans). So how much juice would you need? Well, they didn't say what type of juice they would need, so I just assumed apple juice. I've found this table [German], which tells me that 0.2 liters of apple juice with sugar has 175 kJ. That is, we have an energy of 875 kJ/l. Now a 100 W lightbulb needs 0.1 kJ/s, therefore to power a 100 W lightbulb, we need about 10 liters per day.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    5. Re:So that would make it use about... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well, they didn't say what type of juice they would need, so I just assumed apple juice.

      You're a Mac user, aren't you.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    6. Re:So that would make it use about... by SickHumour · · Score: 2, Funny

      Odd. I usually measure juice in litres, not light bulbs.

  2. Juice! by kevmatic · · Score: 5, Funny

    The same amount of juice to power a 100-watt light bulb!?

    That's like... 100 Watts!

    Unless you go compact florescent. Then its like 15watt.

    1. Re:Juice! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe it was written by one of these people:. (Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to post the link).

      "He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree"

      "The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon."

      "John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met."

    2. Re:Juice! by JustOK · · Score: 5, Funny

      The parent post is as off topic as an off-topic parent post.

      --
      rewriting history since 2109
    3. Re:Juice! by JustOK · · Score: 2, Funny

      Well, a metaphor is like a metaphor.

      --
      rewriting history since 2109
  3. How much power? by l00sr · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let's see... how much power does it take to power a 100-Watt light bulb... hm... Well, according to Wikipedia, a 100-Watt incandescent lightbulb outputs about 1700 lumens. A quick googling reveals that the average incandescent bulb achieves a lighting efficiency of roughly 15.75 lumens per Watt. A simple calculation then yields that the power used by a 100-Watt light bulb is roughly 107.93 Watts. Q.E.D.

    1. Re:How much power? by that+this+is+not+und · · Score: 2, Funny

      I can probably get detectable amounts of light out of a 100 watt bulb with the bulb consuming maybe 4-7 watts. If you insist we can take this matter to the lab and find out.

    2. Re:How much power? by thrillseeker · · Score: 4, Funny

      If you insist we can take this matter to the lab and find out.

      Ah, the never tiring slashdotter pick up line ...

    3. Re:How much power? by dreamchaser · · Score: 2, Funny

      That wasn't a pickup line. It was calling someone out.

      "Want to see my rare collection of Star Trek memorabillia" would be a more typical pickup line.

  4. What's with the summary? by macslas'hole · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A hundred watts, that's all good and well, but what does it have to do with zipping huge files? Or am I reading impaired?

    --
    Life's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
    1. Re:What's with the summary? by UncleTogie · · Score: 3, Informative

      A hundred watts, that's all good and well, but what does it have to do with zipping huge files? Or am I reading impaired?

      My bet is on someone using the word "zip" somewhat like Ballmer used "squirt", i.e., to send quickly...

      --
      Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
    2. Re:What's with the summary? by evanbd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      High-speed networking takes a non-trivial amount of power to drive the signals, be they electrical or optical. Especially for optical devices, the efficiency in getting that power onto the transmission medium is low. At high enough speeds, there are also a lot of high speed transistors switching in the control logic that use power for the same reasons as your CPU. So, they've improved the power consumption in these and other areas.

    3. Re:What's with the summary? by macslas'hole · · Score: 4, Funny

      Ballmer used "squirt"
      Please, Mr. Ballmer, don't squirt me!...

      YUCK!

      The mental image of Sweaty MonkeyBoy and the work squirt should never be in the vicinity of each other. It is an abomination.
      --
      Life's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
  5. Scuttlemonkey by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
    What the hell are you doing to the language of Shakespeare? Did you translate the submission from German?

    While this might not be entirely amazing, the fact that they did it using the same amount of juice required to light a 100-watt lightbulb, is.
  6. IBM Rocks! by The_Dougster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even though a lowly peon like myself can barely aspire to ever own much real IBM hardware, I have to say they really make some great stuff. Since my P20 monitor finally died, all I have now is an IBM Z50 Workpad, which is a pretty sweet little thing.

    I had a RS/6000 briefly, I experimented with running Debian on it. It was some impressive metal, but AIX ran circles around Debian and the graphics was unsupported in Linux. I sold it for more than I payed for it and kept the P20 monitor for free. I ran that monitor for about 5 years.

    IBM hardware has always been esoteric, fantastically expensive, and of supreme quality; however, they are just a bit out of touch with regular lusers. For instance, why can't we buy a workstation with a CELL chip even now? We know it could run Linux, easily. Why are we forced to fool around with PS3 consoles when Big Blue could be making the next best thing since the IBM PC?

    I'd seriously consider spending $5k for a spiffy IBM cell box running AIX or Linux as long as it could run a PCIe OpenGL card. Heck, I'd take it if it came with OS/2 even!

    --
    Clickety Click ...
    1. Re:IBM Rocks! by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Software that's custom made for the cell chip barely exploits all the parallel compute power, so I doubt gcc would compile Linux to make use of it (if it can even compile to cell, which I'm not sure of). IOW, you have no idea what you're talking about. :-) There are out-of-the-box distributions of Linux for Cell platforms (Yellow Dog, Fedora, Ubuntu even), and the gcc supplied in IBM's SDK is quite happy to compile for the PPE and SPE cores. Yes, I've played with all this on the PS/3. PCI and Blade hardware is available from Mercury and IBM, but it's pricey... you could drop one of Mercury's Cell PCI cards into a small IBM xSeries...

      Anyway, I agree with the OP, this is a killer chip for many many of the applications we use today, and IBM should talk Lenovo (or, oh please, SUN) into selling a Cell-based Linux (or, oh please, Solaris) workstation. That would be ridiculous for software development if it had a Java SDK to go with it.
      --
      Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
    2. Re:IBM Rocks! by Oddster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Software that's custom made for the cell chip barely exploits all the parallel compute power, so I doubt gcc would compile Linux to make use of it (if it can even compile to cell, which I'm not sure of). IOW, you have no idea what you're talking about. :-) There are out-of-the-box distributions of Linux for Cell platforms (Yellow Dog, Fedora, Ubuntu even), and the gcc supplied in IBM's SDK is quite happy to compile for the PPE and SPE cores. Yes, I've played with all this on the PS/3. PCI and Blade hardware is available from Mercury and IBM, but it's pricey... you could drop one of Mercury's Cell PCI cards into a small IBM xSeries...

      Anyway, I agree with the OP, this is a killer chip for many many of the applications we use today, and IBM should talk Lenovo (or, oh please, SUN) into selling a Cell-based Linux (or, oh please, Solaris) workstation. That would be ridiculous for software development if it had a Java SDK to go with it. You're both half-wrong. Yes, you can get Linux running on a Cell just fine. No, software that was not written specifically with the Cell in mind (read: almost everything) uses the co-processors (SPU/SPE whatever) anywhere near capacity. And in fact, almost all of the software that is written for the Cell processor still doesn't use the co-processors anywhere near capacity. It is a very difficult platform to program for, and because of the inherent design of the Cell, it simply performs poorly compared to SMP for a large class of problems. And by difficult, I mean that you have to sit there trying to figure out how to fit your 17k of code and 512k of data into a unified 256k buffer (information theory comes in handy), because going outside the local buffer and using DMA is not only a huge pain in the ass to code up, it is also a huge performance hit. Programming for the Cell is a step backwards from the ideal computer science goal of abstracting the hardware from the code.

      I work in the games industry, and I recently saw the performance timer graphs of a very popular racing game that was very recently released for the PS3, a second-generation PS3 title. It was using the co-processors at about 10% of their capacity, and that only came in regular-interval spikes. And this is a piece of software that the Cell was specifically designed to run.

      Trust me, you do not want to be programming for the Cell. Stay happy with SMP on the desktop and above, leave the Cell to die in the PS3 as it should. Yes, it's a bit of a technical marvel, but quite frankly, it is not worth all the secondary costs.
  7. ARRRR! by eggman9713 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Let's just hope the pirate bay doesn't get a hold of this puppy.

  8. 'Zips huge files' by malakai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't be the only one that clicked on this expecting some sort of hardware based compression acceleration. I expected some sort of optical take on compression.

    --
    -Malakai
    A Dragon Lives in my Garage
  9. This Story Raises The Burning Question by SkyDude · · Score: 4, Funny

    How many /.ers does it take to change a lightbulb?



    No one knows. Those who try keep getting electrocuted when their tinfoil hats make contact with the socket.

    --
    == First cross river, then insult alligator.
    1. Re:This Story Raises The Burning Question by maxwell+demon · · Score: 3, Funny
      But they will be able to tell you amazing things about changing light bulbs.
      You'll learn that
      • in Soviet Russia, light bulbs change YOU
      • In Korea, only old people change light bulbs
      • Netcraft confirms: light bulbs are dying
      • A reasonable business plan might look like
        1. Change light bulb
        2. ???
        3. Profit!

      Also, they'll want to know if the light bulb runs Linux, and ask you to imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.
      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  10. 90's Flashback by Fieryphoenix · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Anyone else remember the dramatic claims of special chips that would "soon" allow insane levels of compression in data storage using fractal algorithms? 135 times compression, back when Stacker was was the app that saved your bacon when you ran low on disk space? That's the sort of thing I thought of when I read the headline.