Intel: Advances in silicon photonics can break the I/O “power wall”
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
The benefit is that you get a long, thin and flexible cable, the downside is that these cost and arm and a leg (£400 in the UK for 15m cables).
My (possibly wrong) understanding is that the E-O and O-E conversion adds a non-trivial amount of latency in a situation like that.
Light waves, on the other hand, are two- [linearly-polarized] or three- [circularly-polarized] -dimensional. They’re heading in one direction, and also wiggling side-to-side as they go.
If light didn’t have a “thickness” — that is, if light could “sneak through” gaps narrower than its “diameter” — then 1. “Optical” fibre would be capable of acting as a waveguide for all frequencies, not just optical ones; and 2. the Faraday cage around a microwave wouldn’t prevent the microwaves from escaping.
(You might think we’d also get universal antennas out of that, but no, antennas are a quantum thing—it’s not about squeezing through a gap, but about exciting an AC electric field in the material, so letting the whole wavelength hit the antenna actually causes the induced field to destructively interfere with itself. Think of an antenna as absorbing the wave “head-on”, rather than “side-on.” Your antenna needs to catch half the wave — node to anode to node — to get the highest-power signal out. But you don’t miss the wave entirely if you catch less. You just get a less powerful signal — it’s still possible to do useful work [like power an optical receiver, or decode an AM radio signal] with just a 1/Nth slice of each cycle of the wave.)
Astonishing numbers. 1pJ is tiny. And yet that's still cooking away at a whole watt of TX power.
they had one of their very first demonstrations a year ago[2].
it's promising as heck. and I dont mind that it's taking a while. but it is also an area I have, after the many years, learned to keep tempered expectations on.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/07/the-future-of-electr...
[2] https://www.servethehome.com/hands-on-with-the-intel-co-pack...
Latency comes to mind. But also how many people does it take to troubleshoot a system where the compute, memory, and storage are all in different physical locations?
Building a distributed system seems fragile.
>memory unit that can be shared between a few computers and then reconfigured as needed
It reminds me of reading recently about Compute Express Link, when Micron announced they were moving away from 3D Xpoint and would focus on CXL.
https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/03/25/cxl-and-the-developing...
All of that because Intel is having trouble moving to 11nm. All of their features were tied to that node process (tick tock). It is why we are seeing Intel back features from the 11nm node back up to 14. As their competitors are not sitting on 2017 tech and milking it. They are moving to the new stuff. xPoint was interesting 5 years ago. When they could make a 128GB stick for half the price of DRAM one. But they did not have the pins on the chip to support the larger workloads. DRAM caught up in size to overcome it. They have them now. But now that config is not as interesting.
Still very far from reality though.
We use binary because it was an improvement on analog, and it beat out ternary or higher orders. However, light can have a number of effectively binary attributes. I wonder if you could use polarity in addition to the light's presence for smuggling more data into a "bit"
The real reason for all the news you see today, and that you will see until the end of times is caused by peak dead trees.
Or atleast until the sun has powered enough trees, which BTW is the best solar panel AND battery; to make the same amount of coal, oil and gas we had in the early 1900.
Though you are technically correct that Light will propagate faster through optical cables than it will in copper cable.