Posted on 03/26/2007 11:32:53 AM PDT by rawhide
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) scientists plan to unveil a prototype chip Monday that uses optical connections to increase the speed of moving data among chips to eight times that of previous technologies.
The chip's speed, clocked at 160 billion bits of data a second, would allow a high-definition movie to be transmitted over a short distance in a fraction of a second, compared with the half-hour it takes over home broadband connections, IBM said.
The technology could pave the way for devices that almost instantly transmit a digital X-ray to a doctor's hand-held screen, a seismic analysis to an oil engineer's workstation or movies around home networks.
Analysts briefed on the technology said it represents a breakthrough in combining traditional semiconductor technology with optical transmission of bits of light called photons, which are faster and more energy-efficient than electrons.
The new chip was developed by a team of scientists at IBM's T.J. Watson Research center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The scientists will present their work at the Optical Fiber Conference in Anaheim, Calif.
Mr. Meyerson said products using the technology are likely to appear within three years. He said the technology might be incorporated into large chips used in servers such as IBM mainframes or it might be used in giant communications switches and routers. He declined to say how IBM plans to market the technology.
Richard Doherty, research director of Envisioneering Group, Seaford, N.Y , who was briefed on the project, said "it's an amazing use of" traditional semiconductor technology. Noting that the research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he added that "this isn't some blue-sky" lab demonstration.
Based on past experience, he said, he expects IBM to have some commercial products using the technology in 18 to 30 months.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Can a dramatically richer, thicker dip be far behind?
Owl_Eagle
If what I just wrote made you sad or angry,
it was probably just a joke.
Intel has already been working on this and announced it last year...
Internet porn sites rejoice.
Not a problem!
Microshaft will bloat VISTA some more and make sure any extra power and speed is neutralized...
That's nothing...
I imagined all this in a blink of an eye....!!!
wrong thread dude.
But anyone who has got Root,
will profit. i.e. OS X and Linux
Remember 4.77 MHz with a 10 MHz Turbo button? Oh yeah, and a 10 MB hard drive. And an MS-DOS backup utility consisting of the COPY command to 5.25" floppies. Everything you'd ever need. Color VGA was considered extravagant.
"The chip's speed, clocked at 160 billion bits of data a second, would allow a high-definition movie to be transmitted over a short distance in a fraction of a second, compared with the half-hour it takes over home broadband connections, IBM said"
Oh, goody, now I can watch "The Longest Day" while taking a pee break.
Was that with our without Hercules graphics card?
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