TheScore may just be the best sports app on the iPad to date. It’s not only chock full of news, blogs, videos, and other good stuff, it’s also free. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-20011821-243.html” class=”origPostedBlog”iPad Atlas/a/p
A new research breakthrough from Intel combines silicon chips and lasers to transmit data at 50 gigabits per second — and someday, maybe as fast as a terabit per second.
The 50-Gbps speed is enough to download an HD movie from iTunes, or up to 100 hours of digital music, in less than a second.
The technology, known as silicon photonics, can be used as a replacement for copper wires to connect components within computers, or between computers in data centers.
“The fundamental issue is that electronic signaling relying on copper wires is reaching its physical limits,” says Justin Rattner, chief technology officer for Intel, which announced the breakthrough Tuesday. “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.”
Photonics refers to the generation, modulation, switching and transmission of light, and can be done using lasers or light-emitting diodes.
Over the next two years, Intel hopes to perfect the technology by improving the efficiency of the lasers, as well as the packaging and assembly of the silicon chips and the manufacturing techniques needed to churn out millions of these modules.
“We have a good sense of the challenges here and what it takes to put all the components together, so we expect the technology to be widely deployed by the middle of the decade,” says Mario Paniccia, director of the Photonics technology lab at Intel.
Copper cables are the lifeblood of computing today. But they are limited by length because of the signal degradation that comes with using them over distances.
“At speeds of 10 Gbps and higher, it is difficult to move electrons fast enough and with enough signal strength to beat the tradeoffs,” says Rattner.
This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other, says Intel. The alternative is to transmit data over optical fiber, but that is expensive and also limited.
“It’s not an issue if you are using only a few of them in an undersea cable,” says Rattner, speaking about optical fiber cables. “But if you want to have optics widespread, from consumers to supercomputers, the cost has to be taken down or it is not practical.”
That’s where integrated silicon photonics could come in. Using silicon-based chips and the same manufacturing process currently used for those chips, photonics modules could replace copper connections.
It could change how computers and data centers are designed in the future, says Intel. Earlier this year, the company showed its Light Peak technology that uses optics to deliver bandwidth of 10 Gbps and higher. Silicon-based photonics can go much higher, reaching tera-scale data rates, says Intel.
Here’s how the silicon photonics prototype works to achieve the 50-Gbps rate. Each module has a silicon transmitter and a receiver chip. The transmitter chip has four lasers whose light beams travel into an optical modulator. The modulator encodes data onto them at 12.5 Gbps. The four beams are then combined to output a total data rate of 50 Gbps.
The receiver chip at the other end of the link separates the four optical beams and directs them into photo detectors. The detectors convert the data back into electrical signals.
“In the labs, we ran this for 27 hours with no errors and transferred about a petabit of data,” says Paniccia. “And all this at room temperature with no fancy cooling.”
The silicon-based photonics chip could be used within a computer or to communicate from server to server in a data center. “If we are talking about CPU-to-memory connection, we would take our photonics chip and put it close to the CPU to bypass the copper interconnects,” says Paniccia. “For now we are not talking about integrating with the CPU.”
As the next step, Intel researchers are trying to increase the data rate by boosting the modulator speed and increasing the number of lasers per chip.
“If you increase the data rate of the modulator and put more than four lasers on a chip you can scale the whole thing,” says Paniccia. “The 50-Gbps rate is just the beginning.”
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Photo: A 50Gbps Intel Photonics module/Intel
Continue reading ChouChou Electric Butterfly flutters to life inside a jar
ChouChou Electric Butterfly flutters to life inside a jar originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
I feel like a castaway in a sea of glossy black plastic, chrome, and glowing blue buttons. Do we really need every piece of electronics to look the same, sandwiched in this shiny ebony that is the 21st Century beige? More »
Developer wrongfully banned thousands of Call of Duty gamers in the past two weeks; company president offers mea culpa, free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 as recompense.
A four-legged robot nicknamed “Ranger” has set a distance record, walking 14.3 miles before it ran out of juice.
That amounts to 108.5 laps around the 1/8-mile indoor track at Cornell University’s Barton Hall — or 65,185 steps of Ranger’s spindly metal legs.
The robot’s journey took it 10 hours, 40 minutes and 48 seconds, using about a penny’s worth of electricity for each 3 miles it traversed. Although several humans accompanied it for parts of its stroll, Ranger was never touched by human hands during the journey.
Earlier versions of Ranger walked just 1 kilometer in 2006 and 9.07 kilometers (5.6 miles) in 2008.
Ranger’s steps are coordinated by 6 on-board microprocessors, but the robot’s steering is done by remote control. The “eyes” and “ears” on the robot are not sensors, but foam padding, designed to protect the robot in case of falls.
The research team that built Ranger was aiming for distance, not speed. By comparison, Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, an eerie quadrupedal robot built for carrying 300-pound loads, set the previous robot walking distance record of 12.8 miles. But BigDog is loud and frightening, while Ranger is quiet and kids love him (at least, one kid appears to).
See below for more photos and a video showing Ranger’s long walk. And for details and more photos, see the Cornell Ranger 2010 page at Cornell.edu.
Jason Cortell, Lipeng Yuan, Matthew Proudlove and Fatemeh Hasaneini accompany Ranger as it rounds the curve on an indoor track.
Humans Jason Cortell (on cart) and Lipeng Yuan may be at the limits of their endurance, but Ranger walks on.
At the end of the marathon walking session, Ranger and Jason Cortell take a much-needed break. Somebody call Beer Robot!
Top photo: Ranger completes a lap around the track, accompanied by Fatemeh Hasaneini, the 6-year-old daughter of one of the students who worked on the robot.
Photos and video courtesy Cornell University.
See Also:
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter. And don’t overlook the world-dominating plans of Wired.com’s own Beer Robot.
CNET reviews the Toshiba BDX2700, finding that it’s a little cheaper than other midrange Blu-ray players and includes 7.1 analog outputs, but otherwise there’s little reason to favor it over faster models with better features.
To say RIM has a lot riding on BlackBerry 6 is an understatement. With new kids on the block like Android and iOS stepping in with lustworthy apps and attractive UIs, the BlackBerrys have been sitting in a corner BBMing everyone else at the party trying to convince them of its sustained utility. Regardless, the latest tease on the BlackBerry Blogs shows off some of the “fresh, but familiar” elements that are getting polished in the jump from OS 5 to OS 6. While some features do have us intrigued — its implementation of universal search, for example — other headlining changes to the otherwise staid homescreen have us begging for more. New “views,” toggled from a space right under the notification bar, are essentially glorified folders, and the “quick access area” is much like the functionality offered by years-old “Today”-style themes for the handset. Don’t get us wrong, the refinements definitely help, but at the end of the day we just hope it isn’t RIM trying to put lipstick on a pig — guess we’ll find out when we get a commercial release to really bite into.
[Thanks, Jason K]
Latest BlackBerry 6 preview proves that the more things change… originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Before you start: yes, the idea of connecting Apple’s Magic Trackpad to an iPhone or iPad is kind of stupid, because these devices already have touch screens. But various people have been asking about whether Apple’s new Bluetooth gadget works with iOS devices anyway, so we decided to try it.
The concept of touching things such as light or smells isn’t anything new, but there’s so much room for interpretation that it’s always interesting to see new applications. At Siggraph 2010, a new tactile display is being shown off which allows the user to feel light and shadow. Called Touch Light Through the Leaves, the device consists of a camera which detects light, and 85 vibration units, which have motors, process the light and shadow information into sensations. Check out the video below to see it in action, and hit up the source link for a bit more info.
Continue reading Tactile display allows you to ‘feel’ both light and shadow
Tactile display allows you to ‘feel’ both light and shadow originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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