

IBM Develops Optical Bus; "computer systems 100 times as fast" - ygd
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/get-on-the-optical-bus/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=090910

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v413
Intel is already preparing optical interconnect products (starting with
10gb/s) based on Light Peak.

<http://www.anandtech.com/print/3834>
<http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm>

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yread
Yep. Plus they actually have working demos and are going to ship next year.

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illumen
the punchline:

"Within five years, we hope to connect microprocessors and memory chips right
to the optochip, producing the optical analogue to the electrical multichip
modules in today's big-iron machines."

At only 10 Gb/s, there are already buses available that do better than that.
The good part is the small size I think. At another point they say 160 2 Gb/s
links in a small package. That's the goodness.

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drtse4
Another big plus will be the _huge_ reduction in latency, it can't get lower
than that. I'm wondering at how much they will be able to sell it, from what
i've seen working in this field common opto-electrical transceivers are not
usually cheap (but they will need a less complex/very low power design, so
this could not be a problem).

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Vivtek
And possibly economies of scale will kick in when the high-end mass market
starts to transition.

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kia
single page
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/get-...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/get-
on-the-optical-bus/0)

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whatusername
sounds impressive. Who wants to guess at how long before we see this actually
available in anything? (Even a mainframe/big pSeries box) 5 years? 10?

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CamperBob
Considering this same article has basically been appearing like clockwork
about every year for the last 25 or so years, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Optical interconnects have been the Next Big Thing for a _long_ time now.

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mechanical_fish
This is true. Though, I assure you, as someone who worked on the generation of
optical interconnects before this one: The invention of the VCSEL really has
changed the game, as has the invention of cheap planar arrays of microlenses.
These are not the lasers of 1990.

