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IBM Optical Chip Moves Data At 1Tbps
snydeq writes "IBM researchers have developed a prototype optical chip that can transfer data at 1Tbps, the equivalent of downloading 500 high-definition movies, using light pulses, the company said Thursday. The chip, called Holey Optochip, is a parallel optical transceiver consisting of both a transmitter and a receiver, and is designed to handle the large amount of data created and transmitted over corporate and consumer networks as a result of new applications and services. It is expected to power future supercomputer and data center applications, an area where IBM already uses optical technology."
User judgecorp links to more coverage, writing "The record was achieved because 24 holes in the chip allow direct access to lasers connected to the chip."
n/m
What's the equivalent in number of movie uploads?
So they consider a 2 Mbps stream to be HD?
1 terabit per second is 128 gigabyte per second - if they can fit 500 HD in 128 GB that compression is to me a much more important breakthrough...
All the kids will be running around with their stupid laser pointers hacking into WoW!
-- no sig today
Flying Car
Optical Computer
Pay Increase
Not a chance on all three
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I guess there must be an old Batman and Robin fan on the marketing team. Cool...
...I'm sure Chris Dodd (MPAA) appreciates data transfer being expressed in the new "downloading HD Movies per second" metric. Perhaps we should call this the Dodd. Hey this new chip is rated at 500 Dodd!
I don't watch movies. Could someone get this in terms of LOCs?
Anybody want a peanut?
ought to be enough for anybody.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a geek site. You can just say 1 Tbps, and expect the reader to comprehend that without some bullshit hokey metric that doesn't mean anything at all. It's 128gb a second, how the fuck is that 500 "high definition movies"? Maybe 500 HDR light probes.
Does it also save enough electricity to plant 4 trees a day? Does it conserve enough water to wash 400 pairs of boxer shorts? Is it bigger than a breadbox?
This is slashdot, you shouldn't accept shit thats copy and pasted from cnn or foxnews' "technology" sections.
What makes yours any more useful?
Somewhat on topic, would current storage hardware technology limit the usefulness of the chip's capabilities?
Zillion movies available and nothing worthwhile to watch
Please make the units at least comparable. It's bad enough to measure data SIZE in "HD movies" (or LoC's), but then saying its equal to a data RATE without saying how long that might take is just wrong.
mod me funny
in 250ms!
At 1Tbps, you could copy my porn collection in only five hours!!!!!
was Chris Dodd dropping after fainting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How would you like to be the technician who had to align 24 photodiodes and 24 lasers to 48 optical fibers on a 5mm x 5mm die. They should have a picture of that heroic individual in the press release. But no, the PR people are just making up crap about transfer rates.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I'm guessing they mean 500 HD movies per second? Otherwise, unit math doesn't work out... One measures speed, the other is size.
Also, 250mb per HD movie? I'm guessing they mean YouTube movie or something, because at 720p (2250 kbps), that's only about 15 min of video. Maybe they mean every 10 seconds?
When my ISP rolls this out I'll be able to hit my bandwidth cap in just a few milliseconds.
When, exactly, did we go from "Libraries of Congress" to "HD Movies" as a standard measure of data?
After RTFA, the Optical chip was all about pushing data from one side of the chip to the other using optics rather than electricity. The 1Tbps is just the throughput rather than any actual processing power. While I don't forsee an actual optical processing chip, where I can see this being useful is to speed up the transfer rates between main memory and the CPU, or possibly even between caches in the CPU. What won't change is how the data is being processed (using electrons). What remains to be seen is whether the cost of converting the light to an electrical signal (for processing and modifying the switches in storage) would be sufficently low enough to make it practical for any personal purpose.
This is a geek site. You can just say 1 Tbps, and expect the reader to comprehend that without some bullshit hokey metric that doesn't mean anything at all. It's 128gb a second, how the fuck is that 500 "high definition movies"?
Perhaps you missed the dozens and dozens of posts above yours, but we get a charge out of poking pedantic holes in this kind of bullshit. In a society where being well-informed, of above average intellegence, or well educated is increasingly equated with being some sort of eliteist snob, this is where we come to seek comradery and refuge and try to resist the rising tide of anti-itellectualism. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go wait for the next article ot appear so I can try to get FIRST POST!
So now I can reach Comcast's bandwidth cap in in 2 seconds, huzzah!
let the porn transfer begin lol.
I just want to know how expensive production of that single chip is.
Lets assume the bandwidth big enough for that
There, that should be an easy comparison.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
...as in, "Holey Optochip, Batman! Than was fast!" How creative.
Speed holes.
The linked article sucks. Here it is straight from the horse's mouth.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37095.wss
Then it is now. For that matter, that kind of data rate is going to seriously screw with many existing LAN and cluster fabrics - very few are designed to support that kind of on-the-wire rate. You'd need awe-inspiring hardware filtering and buffering to be able to convert between speeds on one side and speeds on the other. (The value would be that you could build one hell of a "fat tree" network if a single fibre is enough to guarantee that the total bandwidth of 20 downstream nodes is equal to the total upstream bandwidth.)
Combine that with this story - a single channel rate of 400 Gbps (512 Gbps including error-correction) over very long distances. (Wikipedia says 128 channels per fibre is available.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17271797
That's 50 terabits per second, multiplexed. Since they're using older, clunkier technology to handle the lasers than this chip, the throughput that is technically possible will logically be much greater -- with the system for doing so being smaller and more energy-efficient.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No mod points today, but the parent post summarizes the Internet. +1 insightful.
Some of us miss when this was a site with tech professionals and enthusiasts, and an article like this might have some posts with some actual technical or real world insight. People would talk about how the technology works, speculate on uses for it, relate real world anecdotes, point out potential barriers or problems.
Now every post is just a bunch of unfunny cockwanking attempts at 'humor'. None of it is ever entertaining or funny.
If you think it is funny, go ahead and take that shit with you back to fark when you leave.
can they make a cpu out of this tech ?
Ya beat me to it! My first thought: Holy Optochip Batman!
no because it would not be used in a machine with disks.
This would be used to link two carrier class routers together. The aggregate traffic on both routers would likely be enough to start using this level of bandwidth.
Also, likely to be used in transoceanic trunks if they can Tx far enough.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
How many libraries of congress per fortnight?
Homer: [suspicious] Hey, what are all these holes?
Salesman: [quickly] These are speed holes. They make the car go faster.
100 years from now, under the USA economics, the last mile to my house will *still* be 1.5 very fuzzy-noisy megabits/second.
1Tbps????
So what?!
I dunno about you, but the last time I ripped an HD movie, it was about 240Gbits.
I would say FOUR HD movies, not FIVE HUNDRED.
Although, as usual, the shitty slashdot summary doesn't give proper units (i.e. 500 HD movies / unit time), so I suppose anything is possible.
I was turned down for a job by a company that competes with IBM making this equipment. IBM's shit is better. I guess I'm lucky.
no, 1 tbps is NOT the equivalent of downloading 500 movies. in the same way that 5 GL/sec is not the same as have 1million buckets.
I remember a slashdot argument months ago where I was trying to come up with ways to create larger multiprocessor CPUs given current limitations. I believe one idea I had was to make holes for data/connectors of some kind. Nice to see great minds thinking alike! (The other person in the argument was basically being negative rather than trying to find solutions like this. Ha ha.)
I have for years told people that the optical communication on CPU's would greatly speed up prossesing power i cant wait until they perfect it
Now fabricate a giant 9' round
Invoke the watchers.
Do the chants.
"There's no money for this new digital SHIT"
"There's no legal place on planet Earth, (unless you are a Tyrant or Tyrant's oath breaker) to use this new digital SHIT"
"But hey, it's more fun than SuSE vs SCO right now"
"We are IBM Bitchez!"
"So let it be."
"I give thanks to the watchers"
Wait...couldn't they just put these end-to-end, and have the data going around in circles around the network until needed?
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
Yes, it's called a ring buffer and has a long history, one of the earliest computer memories used this technique.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump