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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."

14 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 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.

    2. 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.
    3. 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.
  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. 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 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 ...

  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. '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
  7. 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.