Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It also tells us that the speed of light has not increased.

(well, speed of signal on a PCB track is roughly 2/3 light and determined by the transmission line geometry and the dielectric constant, but you all knew that)

View on HN

And Speed of light within Glass. We could still get that 1/3 back when we could somehow make ultra long distance hollow cable. We could get that Packet round trip from 150ms to 100ms.

But I dont think hollow cable are anywhere close to commercial launch.

Starlink will get us there for at least long-distance connections once they have the laser inter-sat links fully connected.

At that level of optimization, the problem is not isolated. With Starlink the gain by using lasers is potentially lost with the additional processing that needs to happen when bouncing over multiple satellites.

Which latency are you suggesting is limited by the speed of light?

It wasn't the speed of light, it was the size of atoms that was the issue here. As old-style scaling (the kind used up until about 2003) continued, leakage power was increasing rapidly because charge carriers (electrons / holes) would tunnel through gates (I'm simplifying a bit here, other bad effects were also a factor). It was no longer possible to keep increasing clock frequency while scaling down feature size. Further reduction without exploding the power requirement meant that the clock frequency had to be left the same and transistors needed to change shape.

"Packet roundtrip CA to Netherlands"

No, at the speed of light 150 ms is about long enough to send a packet from SF to Amsterdam and then send the reply back the long way around the entire rest of the planet.

https://wondernetwork.com/pings/San%20Francisco

Yes, that shows that the time could theoretically be roughly halved without even bothering to transmit in a medium with faster propagation than glass fiber.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com