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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
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 don't watch movies. Could someone get this in terms of LOCs?
Anybody want a peanut?
10 years in jail I imagine. But think of how fast you could pirate things with the advances in technology when you get out!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
ought to be enough for anybody.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
So they consider a 2 Mbps stream to be HD?
Had to cut corners somewhere -- the bill from AT&T would have bankrupted them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Pssst. 1/500 of 1Tb/s is 2Gb/s not 2Mb/s. I think they are saying you can download 500 movies in 1 second, not the equivilent of streaming continually at 1Tb/s. 1Tb/s just blows my mind.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
10 years in jail seems extreamly low for 500 HD movies.
Piracy is for immoral noobs who feel self entitled to the work of others.
So, record industry CEOs are pirates, too?
I guess they're all short, art movies.
When my ISP rolls this out I'll be able to hit my bandwidth cap in just a few milliseconds.
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.
Nobody is forcing you to view their movies.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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!
Great news, they've gotten my porn collection transfer time metric down to three hours fourteen minutes, that's a new record.
let the porn transfer begin lol.
You are correct sir.
Piracy is all about self entitled pricks. (and some people who are left out because it is not made available.)
Copyright is also about self entitled pricks.
Remember Copyright is a made up right that was invented to promote more copyrightable works specifically to enrich the public domain.
We gave them some protection and they enrich the public domain.
Of course the self entitled pricks now believe nothing should ever enter the public domain but they should still get their made up protections.
I say fuck all self entitled pricks. And their grandchildren.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Was your post joking? You dropped part of the units. The /s was fairly important.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The scientists will report on the prototype on Thursday at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles. IBM aims to improve on the technology for its commercialization in the next decade with the collaboration of manufacturing partners.
let them improve it first and then they should give a price. Until one is already set which i highly doubt.
No. No drop of a unit. 2GB is about the size of a typical movie, right? If you need 2GB/s, I want to know what DPI and framerate you are using.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
Is that 10 jail-years per second?
The linked article sucks. Here it is straight from the horse's mouth.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37095.wss
More importantly, how many of these chips will fit in a Volkswagen Bus?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
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.
That only makes the original objection worse of a problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I have fiber in my walls and a big media server.
I can push around 600 movies and it won't be piracy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes, or simply 315 569 260 jails.
Not 2GB 2Gb.
Which is why I originally said "And, yes I don't see how 2Gb is enough for a movie. Perhaps the press release folks confused bits with bytes?"
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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
bps is bits per second Bps is bytes per second, being that there are 8 bits in a byte and it's rated in seconds it would be the "time" category you are talking about. Something to remember people, *bps and *Bps is akin to teaspoon and tablespoon. The unit's look similar (tsp tbs), however for needing multiple tbs of unobtaniumspice I'd would hope to be directed in tbs and not tsp.
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
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.
Yep, I agree. Unfortunately, your masters at the MPAA/RIAA/Disney have bribed enough Congressmen and Presidents to steal Public Domain from our citizens. If you don't like it, leave.
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.)
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