The End of the Copper Wire

Tagged: intel, Silicon Photonics, Technology
Source: Jared Maynard - Read the full article
Posted: 1 year 35 weeks ago

And God said, Let there be light: and there was silicon photonics. And God saw the light of 50 Gbps throughput, then thought it was kickass: and God divided the light into four lasers from the darkness. Amen.

"Intel touts silicon photonics as a copper wire successor, for communications and data transmission. According to Justin Rattner, the company's CTO, “electronic signaling relying on copper wires is reaching its physical limits. Photonics gives us the ability to move vast quantities of data across the room or planet at extremely high speeds and in a cost-effective manner.” | more

 

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Mon, 09/20/2010 - 06:32
#1
Andreas Hofer
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Joined: 10/31/2009
Posts: 119

Already have an optical connection between me and my ISP (about 2 KM distance) and a speed of 2 Gbit/s. Sounds pretty sweet at first but those cards or switches require a lot more power than casual Gbit cards and are also running quite hot. And of course all that speed and low latency is useless if your PC is using copper and a like materials on the PCB. That's probably why they are only offering 50 Gbit/s. Recent studies at the Universities of Vienna and Graz have shown that it is possible, with current LWL cables, to reach speeds up to 3 times of that and more when using a different wavelength and more power on a distance of a few kilometers. Now imagine that on a short distance like an office where there is lower latency resulting in even higher speeds.

One other problem is the speed of current hard drives, none of them can match the speed of the cable, so it is a good solution for industrial size networks with lots and lots of drives but at home, even with a Raid 0 configuration, pretty much useless unless you are connecting different networks with each other.

(1Gbit/s copper = max 120MB/s, 50Gbit/s = 5.86TB/s)

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Sun, 09/19/2010 - 22:16
#2
117killer117
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Joined: 09/19/2010
Posts: 4

Strange that looks like copper on the pcb

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Sat, 09/18/2010 - 01:55
#3
dglenn247
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Joined: 04/07/2010
Posts: 68

hasnt anyone seen star trek? This is one of many devices fortold by the great creator himself, Gene Roddenberry!

We already have a form of the communicator, which is where the design for the clam shell cell phone came from. Its only time before more of his ideas come to fruition.

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Fri, 09/17/2010 - 11:17
#4
d3uS2029
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Joined: 03/20/2003
Posts: 288

The end of copper? yea... goodluck in older sub divisions..

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