Intel's Optical Breakthrough Downloads an HD Film in a Second, Literally

Intel's Optical Breakthrough Downloads an HD Film in a Second, Literally
By Sam Biddle, published on Jul 27, 2010 04:42 PM, Source: GIZMODO

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Transfer a song to your phone. Seems pretty fast, right? Now imagine transferring the entire printed catalog of the Library of Congress in a minute and a half. Intel says they've got the technology to make it happen (eventually).

Intel detailed their breakthrough to the press at an event today, marking the milestone of impressive 50 gigabits per second transfer speeds using an underlying technology that could go much, much further. We've covered the promise of fiber optic speeds before, but nothing like this. Intel CTO Justin Rattner explained just what "silicon photonics" even means, why the world needs it, and what it promises in the near future.

Silicon photonics is, simply, the combination of optical technology with traditional silicon chip manufacturing techniques—the same processes used to make all of our CPUs and GPUs. By employing existing methods, turning data into light and back again will be affordable.

The fundamental process is that of transferring data by converting electrons—which are what make the device you're reading this on right now work—into photons. Intel's photonic technology uses a dazzling bit of engineering—and I do mean dazzling, as we're on the scale of your fingernail—to encode data into laser streams. These streams converge into one, and travel along a fiberoptic strand to their destination, where they are decoded from light back into electrons.

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Why would we need anything as complicated and sophisticated as this? The fact of the matter is that we're nearing the limit of what we can do with electrons—and there's no arguing with physics. Once we get in the realm of 10 gigabit transfer speeds, we've pushed copper wiring about as far as it will go without degrading the signal beyond usefulness. And with the mind boggling volume of data swirling around—HD movies, lossless audio, high resolution photos—what might sound excessive today will be essential sooner than we think.

Intel's fiber connection, on the other hand, can take us farther and faster. Immensely so. At the speed Intel has announced today, you could download an HD film from iTunes or 100 hours of music in less than a second. And if they reach their theoretical potential of 1 terabit per second, you could slurp down three seasons of an HD show or backup your entire harddrive in the same amount of time.

[floatleft]http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets...40x_intel3.jpg[/floatleft]Rattner said Intel hopes to have silicon photonics "widely deployed" by mid-decade, though holding one's breath in cases like this is usually a bad idea. We asked Intel, after hearing them tout the advantages silicon photonics offers for consumer devices, whether we could expect to see this technology replacing USB within this timeframe, prompting them to stress that the significance of the breakthrough is in its potential, not its concrete applications—commercial adoption will hinge on the market and manufacturing factors. Still, they have proven the technology works, and works well. For now, I can safely say that they have preemptively ruined USB 3.0 for me. [Intel Silicon Photonics Research]


:source: Source: http://gizmodo.com/5597832/intels-op...ggering-speeds

Wow, this kind of thing is incredible. Instant home networking? lol

Anything that leads to me getting porn faster is a good thing.

Astonishing transfer rates… in a few years we’ll be downloading 3,000 albums and 300 HD movies per minute. Hopefully we will also have solid state 100 exabyte hard drives by then, plus a lot of spare time to enjoy all those tunes and flicks!

unnecessary no point of downloading faster than you can watch or listen

Just imagine if you could do this today, you would download a 25gig blueray movie in 1 second and then wait 30 minutes while your PC transfers it from the temp area to the folder you want it in. DUH! this is for streaming maybe but not collecting (unless the PC is laser optical too) making a mobo laser optical is, what? about 50 years in the future, I doubt will make it past 2012 the way Global Corporations are going now. BP anybody, Haliburton BOA you name it their in destruct mode as it is.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by c0ld

Anything that leads to me getting porn faster is a good thing.

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so ture ;)

hope that in the next years there will be at least more 50 / 100bit things near my hometown.
fucking slow here