Chip Can Transmit All of the Internet's Traffic Every Second (newscientist.com) 53
A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fibre-optic cable -- enough bandwidth to download 230 million photographs in that time, and more traffic than travels through the entire internet's backbone network per second. From a report: Asbjorn Arvad Jorgensen at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues have used a photonic chip -- a technology that allows optical components to be built onto computer chips -- to divide a stream of data into thousands of separate channels and transmit them all at once over 7.9 kilometres.
First, the team split the data stream into 37 sections, each of which was sent down a separate core of the fibre-optic cable. Next, each of these channels was split into 223 data chunks that existed in individual slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. This "frequency comb" of equidistant spikes of light across the spectrum allowed data to be transmitted in different colours at the same time without interfering with each other, massively increasing the capacity of each core. Although data transfer rates of up to 10.66 petabits per second have been achieved before using bulky equipment, this research sets a record for transmission using a single computer chip as a light source. The technology could enable the creation of simple, single chips that can send vastly more data than existing models, slashing energy costs and increasing bandwidth. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01082-z
First, the team split the data stream into 37 sections, each of which was sent down a separate core of the fibre-optic cable. Next, each of these channels was split into 223 data chunks that existed in individual slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. This "frequency comb" of equidistant spikes of light across the spectrum allowed data to be transmitted in different colours at the same time without interfering with each other, massively increasing the capacity of each core. Although data transfer rates of up to 10.66 petabits per second have been achieved before using bulky equipment, this research sets a record for transmission using a single computer chip as a light source. The technology could enable the creation of simple, single chips that can send vastly more data than existing models, slashing energy costs and increasing bandwidth. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01082-z
Rapid technological advances! (Score:3)
Much more rapid than 20 years ago.
Re: Rapid technological advances! (Score:1)
Get net neutrality back. a carrier should be a neutral utility with so bandwidth. They can hide any unregulated message they want it that signal.
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Actually.. This is almost identical to what certain modems did back in the 80's and 90's :) Trailblazer specifically.
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the frequency splitting sounds a lot like ODFM. We've been doing that with fiber since the 90's.
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Yep. This is impressive, but it's implementation, not invention.
Every Second Every Second (Score:5, Funny)
News for Nerds, written by Social Science students.
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So the headline for Nerds Who Understand Stuff is "Chip Can Transmit All of the Internet's Traffic".
Maybe it refers to the entire volume of traffic ever transmitted across the Internet since its inception - per second?
Re: Every Second Every Second (Score:1)
"A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data *per second* [...] more traffic than travels through the entire internet's backbone network *per second*"
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Like a true slashdotter he didn't read past the headline
Re: Every Second Every Second (Score:1)
Re: Every Second Every Second (Score:1)
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At this point they might as well just say it's an assload of bandwidth.
For the non-techies they can measure it in Kardashian shows/sec downloaded.
Re: Every Second Every Second (Score:1)
(*) 2021 prices
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Their asses wouldn't fit through the wires.
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So the headline for Nerds Who Understand Stuff is "Chip Can't Transmit All of the Internet's Porn".
News for Nerds, written by Social Science students.
Fix it for ya.
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
More cats... faster!
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You really mean pussies, you know it.
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No, YOU mean pussies, I mean cats, which is why I said cats.
Or did you mean cats, which is why you said pussies?
Old school oblig (Score:2)
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Is this fast enough to run Duke Nukem Forever?
I don't know about FOREVER, but it'll run Duke Nukem for sure...
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Maybe I Can Finally (Score:2)
Re:Maybe I can finally download a car (Score:1)
Back in my day we could only download roller-skates.
So.. (Score:1)
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how about bubble memory (Score:3)
A microsecond of fiber optic cable is 200 meters long. if you coiled it up into a small area, like 2.5" hard drive format factor. Could I build a delay-line like storage that just recycled a massive amount of data down a very long pipe?
P.S. the answer is no. I could personally not do this. but could someone who actually had some skill and talent?
Re: how about bubble memory (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a downgrade in terms of capacity and latency compared to current dram
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Not to mention: You want to access the storage whenever you need it, not wait for a photon to do hundreds or thousands of loops.
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For decades you've been waiting for a spinning platter to appear under the head. For a hard drive this is fast. For a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray it takes a long time to find the groove when you seek.
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Thank Goof for SSD!
what about this latency ... (Score:2)
What if I told you that your keyboard scans only a row of keys at a time? ;-)
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Good catch, it's not going to be a lot of storage. I think my microsecond loop would only hold 230 megabytes (1.84 gigabits). And of course the access time would be 1 or more microseconds. Nice for secondary storage (hard drive replacement), and not as a replacement for DRAM.
Scalability is possible and interesting (IMO). Each fiber loop would be 1.84 gigabits. if you don't mind a longer access time you could scale up to a larger length, 1000x my original suggestion means a 1 millisecond access time but a tr
Re:how about bubble memory (Score:5, Interesting)
When in university, I knew a guy who did an analogy to this: he used the network as a storage.
All he needed was a router with two addresses (in two networks) , crafted a special packet type, then a firewall rule to forward it from 1 WAN to the other.
Added a daemon to inject/retrieve data into the mechanism. And had a whopping 2kB of storage in the wire (+ various caches on the way...).
I'm fuzzy on the details now, but this was the general idea : keep the packets looping ad infinitum.
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Bufferbloat has been a real problem in networking. Glad someone found a use for it. At layer 2 there shouldn't be a lot of buffers, ingress buffers of a switch being the obvious one. Layer 3 and higher can have substantial buffers that causes all sorts of nasty problems with a large heterogenous network.
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Yes, you could, in principle. I don't think it would be practical for a storage solution —it's too slow to be a useful volatile memory replacement, very volatile, and would only give you a gigabit or so of storage. But it should work just fine.
Someone made a variety of weird storage techniques (ping packets, tetris games, covid tests) into block devices and made an amusing video about it [youtu.be].
16K 360deg VR Porn Streaming (Score:2)
The future looks amazing ... and sticky.
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So it can be contained (Score:1)
Finally! (Score:2)
Call it the Humpty Dumpty chip (Score:3)
Challenge (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the internet can rise to the challenge and saturate this chip completely with cat videos and porn.
Scary (Score:1)