Posted on 12/06/2007 12:07:41 PM PST by ShadowAce
Supercomputers may soon be the same size as a laptop if IBM brings to market research detailed on Thursday, in which pulses of light replace electricity to make data transfer between processor cores on a chip up to one-hundred times faster.
The technology, called silicon nanophotonics, replaces some of the wires on a chip with pulses of light on tiny optical fibers for quicker and more power-efficient data transfers between cores on a chip, said Will Green, research scientist at IBM.
The technology, which can transfers data up to a distance of a few centimeters, is about 100 times faster than wires and consumes one-tenth as much power, Green said. The lower power requirement should reduce operational costs for supercomputers, he said.
"The silicon nanophotonic effort is a high-bandwidth, low-power technology for cores to communicate," Green said.
The technical basis of this research is the same science that led to the development of optical fiber and Internet communications. Silicon nanophotonics brings similar optical communication on chips for centimeters instead of miles, Green said.
The improved data bandwidth and power efficiency of silicon nanophotonics will bring massive computing power to desks, Green said. "We'll be able to have hundreds or thousands of cores on a chip," Green said. Users will be able to render virtual worlds in real-time and have a better gaming experience, he said.
Modulators sitting in each core convert light into pulses that travels over optical fibers in the silicon chip. The modulators don't take up too much space on the chip, Green said.
Silicon nanophotonics is part of a long-term research project and could be implemented in chips within 10 to 12 years, he said.
More cores are being added to chips to boost performance, but electrical wiring that connects cores on current chips doesn't transfer data effectively in these situations, Green said. Electrical wiring suffers from overheating and data signals travel only a few millimeters from one core to another before breaking down, Green said. Silicon photonics sends signals for many centimeters in a power-efficient mode without an attempt to reconstruct the signal, Green said.
Though the technology shows potential to replace copper wires for data transfer on chips, electrical wiring still does well over short distances. Copper wire is essential for transistors in chips to communicate, while silicon nanophotonic technology is used for cores to communicate. "We're complementing the capabilities of copper with our optical technology," Green said.
In addition to IBM, there are a couple of start-up companies and labs in the U.S. that are working on silicon nanophotonics technology, Green said. The IBM project was funded partly by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense.
The first consumer application will be viewing online 3D porn.
Open the Pod Bay door HAL
remote tactile stimulation?
Don’t worry, Bill will make some bloatware for it to make it run slower than molasses in February.
Perhaps, but at least it’ll run cooler than my current laptop!
Porn at the speed of light!............
Vista might run pretty well on one of those...
heh—if you turn off half of its featues....
Today’s laptop is (almost) always yesterday’s supercomputer.
But XP Pro would still outperform it.
Amazing.
How long until the Chinese steal it?
. "Oh, computer...."
well, that’s where the bucks are... porn funded Cisco and Microsoft and the rest of the dot.com boom after all.
As well as being the deciding factor in the BetaMax vs. VHS wars
Awwww.... it was all going great until the “available in 10 to 12 years” part.
It is a dark commentary on human nature that most technological innovations were prompted by war, and most media innovations are financed in their initial development by pornography: salacious novels were much of the initial business for the Guttenberg printing press, most photographic supplies purchased in Victorian England went to pornographers, VHS won over the techically superior Betamax format due to the porn industry’s preference for cheaper technology, and the first profitable online business was porn.
The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a world-record speed of 133 million floating-point operations per second (133 megaflops) and an 8 megabyte (1 million word) main memory.
Todays average laptop is enormously more powerful than the old cray...
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