domino Posted September 18, 2006 Share Posted September 18, 2006 A Chip That Can Transfer Data Using Laser Light SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 17 — Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design. Source: New York Times I think they failed to recognize the biggest bottleneck facing computer design. It doesn't matter if you have 100Ghz of processing power if you have a 7200 or 15000 rpm drive to read and write data. Yes buffer and cache helps, but in the end, a 50yr old technology doesn't help. I wish these "innovators" would stop trying to sell more bs. A 100Ghz process looks great in the ads pages of the Sunday papers or plastered on the front page of a website, but realistically, have they solved the real bottleneck? It's a step forward, but I think it help revenue more than the consumer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sHARD>> Posted September 18, 2006 Share Posted September 18, 2006 Source: New York Times I think they failed to recognize the biggest bottleneck facing computer design. It doesn't matter if you have 100Ghz of processing power if you have a 7200 or 15000 rpm drive to read and write data. Yes buffer and cache helps, but in the end, a 50yr old technology doesn't help. I wish these "innovators" would stop trying to sell more bs. A 100Ghz process looks great in the ads pages of the Sunday papers or plastered on the front page of a website, but realistically, have they solved the real bottleneck? It's a step forward, but I think it help revenue more than the consumer. Actually we could at least continue our 90s pace of processor increase if we could find a way to break the silicon barrier. That is, we're beginning to reach the maximum cycle speed a useful silicon chip can attain. If we continue to increase cycle speed, while improving architecture, we'll have no problems. That said, addressing your point, computers are already fast enough for almost any task. It's only people who demand specialized tasks that need to crank out more speed. Even then, it's generally only people creating videos and other heavy media that actually find the hard disk a bottleneck. Take a look at a major animation studio, and you'll find even then they will be able to write data fast enough through special RAIDs. Moreover, we are looking at flash drives to begin to speed along reading data. But the fact is for most tasks we're nowhere near running out of new ways to pump data fast enough to keep the CPU occupied. I'd hardly call that a stopping point. We've got to break the silicon barrier before that becomes an issue. This is at least a step in that direction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unstatusthequo Posted September 18, 2006 Share Posted September 18, 2006 I agree with the hard drive speed limitation. A friend of mine at Union Pacific told me that to achieve the access speeds they needed, and they have very high rpm drives, and limit them to using only the first sector/track (can't remember) in some specialized RAID configuration for very quick access speeds. Pretty good idea if you can afford it. =P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
domino Posted September 18, 2006 Author Share Posted September 18, 2006 Currently, processor increase in this generation is moving too fast. I'm guessing here, but that's about 700Mhz increase every 3 months. It's not allowing other hardware to catch up. It would be like installing NOS on an engine without re-boring the pistons. The computer isn't going to blow up or cease to functions, but I don't see the point in increasing the processor speed over a specific point for general users. When are the rest of the hardware suppose to catch up? I'm thinking phase out PS2, serial, floppy drives, 10/100 NIC and make room for new generation hardware to be able to fit on a standard ATX/SFF PCB. Multimillion dollar industries and government/privately funded programs that work with super computers will always be around. I'm saying the general public could actually benefit using hard drives that do not have moving parts, such as platters and arms. They have proven that an operating system can run on memory alone, in this case, the PocketPC. I don't see why they can't take that in the desktop PC arena. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Kahuna Posted September 18, 2006 Share Posted September 18, 2006 If they're using laser, what keeps a piece of dust from corrupting the beam? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grav3Mind Posted September 20, 2006 Share Posted September 20, 2006 If they're using laser, what keeps a piece of dust from corrupting the beam? and what happens if a laser goes out......um.....how would one go about replacing one of those @_@....Mini Tweasers anyone? lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
domino Posted September 21, 2006 Author Share Posted September 21, 2006 I imagine will be a closed system just like any other physical drives. Even cigarette smoke can render you drive useless. They have about 5 years to figure out the bugs. Anyone care to speculate how fast general purpose processors will be 5 years from now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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