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IBM Optical Chip Zips Huge Files Using Little Power
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."
100 watts? Anybody want to check my math?
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.