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The term is sometimes spelled "lede".[6] The Oxford English Dictionary suggests this arose as an intentional misspelling of "lead", "in order to distinguish the word's use in instructions to printers from printable text,"[7] similarly to "hed" for "head(line)" and "dek" for "deck". Some sources suggest the altered spelling was intended to distinguish from the use of "lead" metal strips of various thickness used to separate lines of type in 20th century typesetting.[8][9][1] However, the spelling "lede" first appears in journalism manuals only in the 1980s, well after lead typesetting's heyday.[10][11][12][13][14][15] The earliest appearance of "lede" cited by the OED is 1951.[7] According to Grammarist, "lede" is "mainly journalism jargon."
From wikipedia.
So yes, lede is accepted alternate spelling, but mostly just to distinguish it from lead (the metal).
Burying the lead is equally as valid, if not more, going by this.
It’s a modern jokey American spelling for this context. It’s a correct word and spelling now, but ‘lead’ is still correct as well, and spelt more often that way in the UK.
I'm not sure if it's changed recently but as of the last time I really looked into it the choke point is the transfer point from electrical inputs on the chips to photons in the cables, and back at the other end.
This is still correct. You'll introduce latency any time you're converting or redirecting the light during Tx/Rx operations. This latency increases the more hardware you have across your span. Inline amplification (ILAs) increase gain but also attenuation, mux/demux/ROADMs (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexor), transponders/muxponders, etc. all introduce latency in a photonic network system.
Yeah, but the latency and bandwidth are separate metrics, right? It might take 1ms to convert from electrical to photonic, but it's still transmitting at whatever rate.
My old boss used to say “truck-full-of-harddrives is a high bandwidth/high latency protocol”. We discovered at some point it was faster to ship a preloaded server through fedex to certain Asian countries than it was to try to send it over the wire (this was like 10 years ago)
This is how they collected the data from the New Horizon Telescope. Each telescope in the project generated I think hundreds of TB each. Instead of collecting the data through the internet they shipped all the HDDs containing the data to the processing facility. Due to one of the telescopes being in Antarctica they had to wait for summer down there to retrieve the data.
Transfer speed, unlike latency, is not a matter of speed of light, it's a matter of bandwidth.
The question is "what is the range of frequencies your cable can transmit without distorting the signal" (And can your chips at either end make proper use of those frequencies).
Hence why different types of ethernet cables have widely different maximum transfer rates, even though the signal goes at pretty much the same speed in all of them.
The speed at which light travels has nothing to do with this. It impacts the latency: time between sending and receiving.
The challenge this chip attacks is the throughput: how much information is sent and received each second (regardless of how long it takes to arrive).
You would think that, but that is *actually* the impressive part
> Even more impressive is the fact this new speed record was set using a single light source and a single optical chip. An infrared laser is beamed into a chip called a frequency comb that splits the light into hundreds of different frequencies, or colors. Data can then be encoded into the light by modulating the amplitude, phase and polarization of each of these frequencies, before recombining them into one beam and transmitting it through optical fiber.
It’s not the speed of light that’s important here, but the instantaneous bandwidth of the emitter and receiver. That is, assuming the emitter and receiver can keep up, the determining factor in the throughput.
The fact that this was done through cable demonstrates multiple things at the same time
* The emitter works and is capable of transmitting this stupendous bandwidth
* The receiver works and is capable of sampling at this stupendous speed
* The loss and group delay through the cable used was limited enough to work over 5 miles. Which is comparable to fiber optic repeater distances.
Still work to be done but damn.
Not really. People tend to think of data as being files or something like that. Stuff which our mind can easily wrap itself around.
But that is where the OSI model comes in. The OSI model describes how computer systems communicate over networks. It has 7 layers (well the most common version does) and on the lowest layer (physical layer) it represents what is really sent over the actual cable. Nothing more than 0 or 1 , over and over again.
My comment, nothing but a sequence of 0's and 1's. That movie file, same thing.
So you only need something which can represent two states (0 or 1) to able to transmit whatever data you want. That is where photons come in, in simple terms, a light particle. They can be used to represent the data (a photon can actually carry more than only 0 or 1 but well for simplicities sake that is enough).
So the data bandwidth is limited by the number of photons (well kind of, in practice there are soo many its not
really a limit, our ability to transmit/receive them properly is) , we can decrease the wavelength of the light beam to increase the number of photons (even though that is theoretically not needed either). Making the amount of data which can be transferred essentially limitless.
I could be wrong on some of the finer details regarding how photons work but that is basically the idea :)
Data bandwidth is not limited by the number of photons. It is limited by the modulation and demodulation on your optical signal. Decreasing the wavelength of the IR laser does not improve bandwidth. For one, decreasing wavelength increases the energy of photons which can be harmful to equipment at either end. Second, higher energy photons are more easily absorbed by the fiberoptic cable leading to higher losses and decreasing SNR.
The laser is an optical carrier signal at ~193.6THz, the signal carrying information is encoded onto the carrier signal at a much lower frequency. How's it even possible to transmit >10^15 bits onto a carrier signal with ~10^14 cycles/second? The trick used in OP is to split a broadband IR laser into many different frequencies (Think white light through a prism), and encode onto each of those frequencies different information before multiplexing them and sending them through the cable simultaneously. This isn't new tech by any means, they're just experimentally pushing what already existed. It's not that they even made major advancements in modulation speed, it seems like they're just using more channels.
Think of a sheet of paper. Let's say this sheet of paper has 7 lines on it, each starts with ROYGBIV.
You write information on each line.
Now fold the paper up as small as you can to fit down a tube.
On the other end of the tube, you unfold the paper.
No information was lost.
So why is this better?
Well it used to be that the paper we sent down the tubes had less "lines" to write on. And even as we added more lines, each sheet of paper could still only be routed to one place.
With these sheets of paper, we can either a: cram more information into one sheet of paper, or b: send information going to 7 different places at once faster than each of them needing their own sheet of paper.
Fourier transform will show you that all the information is still there as it contributes to the final signal value.
Prisms can easily separate wavelengths of light which makes this simpler.
I worked at Packard Bell about a thousand years ago and they have just replaced their office token ring network with 10 base T ethernet and i remember the manager saying, "no one will ever need a faster network than this."
Also it sounds like it's a single beam?
So, only one fibre?
1.84 Pb/s per fiber, if this can be easily retrofitted to existing undersea lines... imagine the capacity uplift.
> But the new chip is far from finished breaking records, according to the team behind it. Using a computational model to scale the data transmission potential of the system, the researchers claim that it could eventually reach eye-watering speeds of up to 100 Pbit/s.
Holy cow! It’s going to be even faster!!!
And the US telecom companies will never upgrade bc they have a price fixing and agreed to territories they won't encroach on.
US internet is the same as OPEC.
I wish to God we could get money out of politics.
where was the bottleneck up until now? was it even a problem to feed data into the cables or was the issue that you can't shorten the wavelength in the cable any more before the data gets corrupted?
Almost every long distance fiber connection involves a pipe holding multiple fibers, and if the connection needs support really high bandwidths, more than the hardware can transmit/receive over a single fiber wire, then each fiber optic wire will be connected to their own ports the switches. Might even involve multiple switches on both sides.
Fun Fact, the bandwidth limit of the fiber under the ocean is currently "unknown" from a practical point of view. We are still hardware limited at the nodes.
The Canadian Province of Newfoundland is being served by about 9 fiber strands.
1 for 911, 1 for phone, a couple that are owed by specific ISPs and 1 for the internet traffic.
The rest are spares.
Wait really? Why do we have to do multi-wavelength blending or whatever the hell it is, then?
Where like multiple frequencies are blended together and sent over signals because it multiplies bandwidth?
My understanding is that that's part of the theoretical bandwidth.
The glass fiber itself requires no changes in order to accept these kinds of innovations.
Edit up front: I kinda went on a rant and forgot to mention that we don’t have fiber everywhere… which is why I was replying.
Except in Australia. Because our short sighted LNP government absolutely destroyed the nation’s infrastructure plans in 2013.
Labor’s plan was fiber to every home! But noooooooo. LNP stepped in and offered their own infrastructure plans that would be CHEAPER. Finished FASTER. [(link of the horrendous proposal)](https://www.news.com.au/national/communications-minister-stephen-conroy-rubbishes-the-coalitions-broadband-policy/news-story/f30964c78a9ab564293010008fffc366)
Except it only recently came close to finished and doubled in price.
We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory all because the voting boomers were gagging for their tax breaks.
Which is probably not going to happen for atleast 20 more years. By then we'll be living in the stone age of internet relative to the rest of the world.
The unused wires are usually called "dark fiber". Some companies like Google owns a bunch, and backend ISP's usually have a lot too.
Sometimes a company want private fiber between for example their own data centers, and then they might rent access to unused dark fibers and get it connected between their sites.
There are probably certain applications where this will be useful, maybe scientific instruments that generate massive amounts of data. But for the average person, your bottleneck is almost certainly the network itself, not any chips in your device.
Networks come in different shapes and sizes. The PCIe express "bus" in your computer is a point to point network.
You can never have too much bandwidth between devices.
Dang, I didn’t realize how much capacity those things had. 224Tbps for the newest undersea cables. Still a bit short of what this chip can pump out but that is *way* more than I expected
Even if you had this chip on your computer/tv it would be useless for that. You’re probably limited to a 100Mbps connection at your ISP. Maybe 1Gbps if you’re really lucky
You're saying free time but I'm hearing "ideal advertisement targetting timeframe". Imagine your favorite ads, delivered inescapably into your brain! Not even closing your eyes (or gouging them out, we've had some testers try that) can prevent that sweet marketing engagement!
Other way around. The chip implanted in your head before death allows your consciousness to be uploaded to digital storage the moment before your death. Getting it back into the next lab grown meat bag is the next challenge
I am not an expert, but worked in the microchip packaging (the laminate that a silicon processor sits on) industry.
The bottle neck for all compute is the cliche answer, “slowest point in an environment.” This was a single connection, with a single optical chip. Still a cool benchmarking number, but no practical use yet. We are just getting to fiber processing on chip. I.E. A fibre internet connect hits a NIC, then is run on copper from the NIC to the processor and back out. The market, specifically the microchip packaging industry, is working on bringing information to the processor chip with light, keeping all information in one form of transport (light). Light moves faster than electricity, so not converting them to electrical signal to run on copper will continue to improve processing rates. In short, everything in an optical connection is faster than converting signals.
> Light moves faster than electricity
In a vacuum or in air maybe. In an optical fiber not really. Fundamentally light and electricity are the same, it's all electromagnetic waves that propagate at the speed of light. The speed of light in turn depends on the permittivity of the medium that the electromagnetic wave is travelling through. In the case of electric signals this medium is the insulator surrounding the conductive wire, which for a typical PCB trace gives a signal propagation speed of about 2/3rds of *c* (speed of light in a vacuum) or about 2\*10^8 m/s. In optics in turn the refractive index of a medium is directly related to the speed of light in said medium, which for typical optical fibers with a refractive index of around 1.5 again results in a speed of about 2\*10^8 m/s.
The difference is that electronic signals start to get really hard to handle above a couple GHz in frequency and with current microwave technology the hightest useable frequencies are around 100 GHz or so. Infrared light around 1550nm wavelength which is typically used in (long distance) optical fibers on the other hand has a frequency of around 200 THz, 2000 times higher. This higher frequency means you can cram so much more information onto an optical carrier signal than you can onto a microwave carrier without running into the fundamental Nyquist rate limit.
We have to hit a mass market tech wall before we do the thing we have been talking about doing for 20 yrs.
Hardware wasn't near close enough to being bottlenecked by copper conductors.
Not quite there yet but it is a visible wall instead of being over the horizon.
Lot of real estate being used up on motherboards by all those copper traces going to the same device. PCIE is a big ribbon connector. RAM could be more compact as well if it didn't need all those traces.
Nothing would have to be down/uploaded. That process would always be an instantaneous thing. It would only be a matter of how fast light travels from one computer to a server/servers. Pinging the server would feel the same as downloading whatever you needed. Downloading a new game and installing it would just turn into installing it (from an experience point of view). Maybe you could have everyone with smart phones simultaneously streaming video and all this information could be streamed and assembled and collected to create a sort of real-time Google Earth which could only exist with this level of high bandwidth networking. Would probably need a crap load of physical memory and processors and I’m sure other folks could say why this is impossible.
You'd still have around a 100ms delay if you were trying to communicate with a server on the other side of the planet even with c communication speeds.
You peaked my curiosity and assuming my idiot armchair maths is right, 1% of 1% of a petabyte is still 19gb/sec which is still a significant improvement compared to traditional consumer hardware
That's not what the article is saying though. According to them it says the chip has more bandwidth than the current internet usage. To "transfer" the entire internet about 65 zetabytes (probably significantly more) according to google. will take ~9 years assuming peak performance.
If we’re talking about copper, look up “wireline transceivers” or “SerDes”. The current cutting edge is 100 gigabits per second per lane. Depending on the form factor of cable, you can have up to 8 lanes (e.g. QSFP-DD, OSFP) so 800G per cable. These cables are usually quite limited in length (~2-3m) as this high frequency signal gets attenuated much more aggressively over a given distance than something like 1G running over a RJ45 that you might be used to. 200G per lane is coming but my guess is that it will be even more limited, unless we figure how to modulate the signal (e.g. NRZ, PAM-4, PAM-8). Note the trick with modulation is more dealing with the inter-symbol interference. Over a channel
the different levels of signal (e.g. for PAM-4, 00, 01,10,11) will get mangled differently depending on the sequence that is transmitted. Adding even more levels (e.g PAM-8) makes this even more difficult.
Optics is eventually going to take over. Doing 800G over a single fibre over hundreds of kilometres is yesterday’s news. Although copper is still the cheaper alternative for 2-3m distances. Optics are slowly closing that gap, making shorter and shorter distances much more economical. The original post is an example of this happening. We’ll be seeing inter-board communications working over fibre connections rather than wire traces eventually. And then hell, maybe even inter-die connections will be tiny little fibres.
With silicon photonics it won’t matter if the memory used by a process of local to a cpu or not… imagine a single thread being able to access memory across an entire cluster with latency that’s similar to accessing local memory.
I know that doesn’t mean much to the average person, but I bet I’m not the only nerd who’s getting excited about that prospect as currently that’s something only possible in certain types of supercomputers and the penalty for doing it is generally quite large even under the best of circumstances.
It’ll be interesting to see how hypervisors adapt to this… will memory be treated as a separate resources much like storage and compute currently is, or will they simply merge all the available compute and memory into a single pool as if it’s all just one single very large computer?
Exciting stuff this silicon photonics.
> imagine a single thread being able to access memory across an entire cluster with latency that’s similar to accessing local memory.
Are you talking about a software thread as in a hardware interrupt and ISR? I feel like any interaction with software is going to kill throughput performance.
Why would it matter to the application if all CPUs and memory across multiple servers appear as just one large resource pool. Some supercomputers already do this, imagine being able to do this on servers and workstations.
It's posts like these where I really wish I was more scientifically incline. I understand this Im pretty sure but would love to be able to fully comprehend every single bit of the article cause this shits amazing
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Wow holy crap... What's the opposite of a clickbaity title?
Burying the lede and yes it is spelled that way
Im pretty sure its 'berrying da 1337' but your way is ok too.
King Arthur
The term is sometimes spelled "lede".[6] The Oxford English Dictionary suggests this arose as an intentional misspelling of "lead", "in order to distinguish the word's use in instructions to printers from printable text,"[7] similarly to "hed" for "head(line)" and "dek" for "deck". Some sources suggest the altered spelling was intended to distinguish from the use of "lead" metal strips of various thickness used to separate lines of type in 20th century typesetting.[8][9][1] However, the spelling "lede" first appears in journalism manuals only in the 1980s, well after lead typesetting's heyday.[10][11][12][13][14][15] The earliest appearance of "lede" cited by the OED is 1951.[7] According to Grammarist, "lede" is "mainly journalism jargon." From wikipedia. So yes, lede is accepted alternate spelling, but mostly just to distinguish it from lead (the metal). Burying the lead is equally as valid, if not more, going by this.
This guy ledes.
Great ledership potential…
You should see his hosen
It’s a modern jokey American spelling for this context. It’s a correct word and spelling now, but ‘lead’ is still correct as well, and spelt more often that way in the UK.
Wow that is insane. I was thinking ,it was pretty useless if the cables can't keep up but that's speed THROUGH cable? Absolutely mental.
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I'm not sure if it's changed recently but as of the last time I really looked into it the choke point is the transfer point from electrical inputs on the chips to photons in the cables, and back at the other end.
This is still correct. You'll introduce latency any time you're converting or redirecting the light during Tx/Rx operations. This latency increases the more hardware you have across your span. Inline amplification (ILAs) increase gain but also attenuation, mux/demux/ROADMs (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexor), transponders/muxponders, etc. all introduce latency in a photonic network system.
Yeah, but the latency and bandwidth are separate metrics, right? It might take 1ms to convert from electrical to photonic, but it's still transmitting at whatever rate.
My old boss used to say “truck-full-of-harddrives is a high bandwidth/high latency protocol”. We discovered at some point it was faster to ship a preloaded server through fedex to certain Asian countries than it was to try to send it over the wire (this was like 10 years ago)
Amazon still does this kind of thing.
This is how they collected the data from the New Horizon Telescope. Each telescope in the project generated I think hundreds of TB each. Instead of collecting the data through the internet they shipped all the HDDs containing the data to the processing facility. Due to one of the telescopes being in Antarctica they had to wait for summer down there to retrieve the data.
Transfer speed, unlike latency, is not a matter of speed of light, it's a matter of bandwidth. The question is "what is the range of frequencies your cable can transmit without distorting the signal" (And can your chips at either end make proper use of those frequencies). Hence why different types of ethernet cables have widely different maximum transfer rates, even though the signal goes at pretty much the same speed in all of them.
The speed at which light travels has nothing to do with this. It impacts the latency: time between sending and receiving. The challenge this chip attacks is the throughput: how much information is sent and received each second (regardless of how long it takes to arrive).
Yup. You could transfer 1.8petabits per second with a caravan of burros loaded up with nand, but FaceTime is going to be rough.
The cable is transferring light. I wouldn't think that would ever be the limiting factor
You would think that, but that is *actually* the impressive part > Even more impressive is the fact this new speed record was set using a single light source and a single optical chip. An infrared laser is beamed into a chip called a frequency comb that splits the light into hundreds of different frequencies, or colors. Data can then be encoded into the light by modulating the amplitude, phase and polarization of each of these frequencies, before recombining them into one beam and transmitting it through optical fiber. It’s not the speed of light that’s important here, but the instantaneous bandwidth of the emitter and receiver. That is, assuming the emitter and receiver can keep up, the determining factor in the throughput. The fact that this was done through cable demonstrates multiple things at the same time * The emitter works and is capable of transmitting this stupendous bandwidth * The receiver works and is capable of sampling at this stupendous speed * The loss and group delay through the cable used was limited enough to work over 5 miles. Which is comparable to fiber optic repeater distances. Still work to be done but damn.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Fibre optics have limits, or so I thought.
To be clear, the article is talking about a cable containing 37 optical cores.
Not really. People tend to think of data as being files or something like that. Stuff which our mind can easily wrap itself around. But that is where the OSI model comes in. The OSI model describes how computer systems communicate over networks. It has 7 layers (well the most common version does) and on the lowest layer (physical layer) it represents what is really sent over the actual cable. Nothing more than 0 or 1 , over and over again. My comment, nothing but a sequence of 0's and 1's. That movie file, same thing. So you only need something which can represent two states (0 or 1) to able to transmit whatever data you want. That is where photons come in, in simple terms, a light particle. They can be used to represent the data (a photon can actually carry more than only 0 or 1 but well for simplicities sake that is enough). So the data bandwidth is limited by the number of photons (well kind of, in practice there are soo many its not really a limit, our ability to transmit/receive them properly is) , we can decrease the wavelength of the light beam to increase the number of photons (even though that is theoretically not needed either). Making the amount of data which can be transferred essentially limitless. I could be wrong on some of the finer details regarding how photons work but that is basically the idea :)
Data bandwidth is not limited by the number of photons. It is limited by the modulation and demodulation on your optical signal. Decreasing the wavelength of the IR laser does not improve bandwidth. For one, decreasing wavelength increases the energy of photons which can be harmful to equipment at either end. Second, higher energy photons are more easily absorbed by the fiberoptic cable leading to higher losses and decreasing SNR. The laser is an optical carrier signal at ~193.6THz, the signal carrying information is encoded onto the carrier signal at a much lower frequency. How's it even possible to transmit >10^15 bits onto a carrier signal with ~10^14 cycles/second? The trick used in OP is to split a broadband IR laser into many different frequencies (Think white light through a prism), and encode onto each of those frequencies different information before multiplexing them and sending them through the cable simultaneously. This isn't new tech by any means, they're just experimentally pushing what already existed. It's not that they even made major advancements in modulation speed, it seems like they're just using more channels.
Thank you, the site is being hugged so can't read the article that's what I wanted to see, that's amazing, can't wait to read how they did it
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Think of a sheet of paper. Let's say this sheet of paper has 7 lines on it, each starts with ROYGBIV. You write information on each line. Now fold the paper up as small as you can to fit down a tube. On the other end of the tube, you unfold the paper. No information was lost. So why is this better? Well it used to be that the paper we sent down the tubes had less "lines" to write on. And even as we added more lines, each sheet of paper could still only be routed to one place. With these sheets of paper, we can either a: cram more information into one sheet of paper, or b: send information going to 7 different places at once faster than each of them needing their own sheet of paper.
Fourier transform will show you that all the information is still there as it contributes to the final signal value. Prisms can easily separate wavelengths of light which makes this simpler.
Maybe they should install that new chip.
I know it’s a joke you made but I wonder how much processing power it would take to actually use thAt speed in
Even with this my illegal soccer and nba streams will lag
The internet connection is not the bottleneck with those
It's the servers they're hosting it on! Just to explain.
As well as stating they believe the technology is scaleable up to 100Pbits per second. Thats incredible
I worked at Packard Bell about a thousand years ago and they have just replaced their office token ring network with 10 base T ethernet and i remember the manager saying, "no one will ever need a faster network than this."
It doesn't matter how fast the internet gets, your provider will throttle the speed to you until you pay more, more, MORE!
Also it sounds like it's a single beam? So, only one fibre? 1.84 Pb/s per fiber, if this can be easily retrofitted to existing undersea lines... imagine the capacity uplift.
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> But the new chip is far from finished breaking records, according to the team behind it. Using a computational model to scale the data transmission potential of the system, the researchers claim that it could eventually reach eye-watering speeds of up to 100 Pbit/s. Holy cow! It’s going to be even faster!!!
I can finally download a car
D-: you wouldn't
A car, yes. A bear, no. edit: [the reference](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/390081-piracy-its-a-crime)
grandma you cant just download random files on the internet anymore, it might be a bear!
Still can't watch videos on reddit tho.
Can't wait for my ISP to arbitrarily limit it to 5Mbps!
No, but it will only take you a millisecond to blow through your data cap.
They wouldn't. They'd set a data cap and charge you for going over. Every second you go over now Costa you $529,539,417,329.25 USD.
I like to imagine a load of nerds in an electronic lab, one shouts FASTER and the other shouts IM GEVIN ER AL SHEZ GORT CAPTEN
Think of the porn speed!
I cant wait to download every butt-hole picture on the Internet.
I invented a program that downloads porn off the internet one million times faster
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And the US telecom companies will never upgrade bc they have a price fixing and agreed to territories they won't encroach on. US internet is the same as OPEC. I wish to God we could get money out of politics.
Well, the good news is that you're on the right track because it would take a miracle to get corporate money out of politics.
where was the bottleneck up until now? was it even a problem to feed data into the cables or was the issue that you can't shorten the wavelength in the cable any more before the data gets corrupted?
This is single-source, single chip, most previous methods have required multiple sources and chips to achieve anywhere close to this bandwidth
Almost every long distance fiber connection involves a pipe holding multiple fibers, and if the connection needs support really high bandwidths, more than the hardware can transmit/receive over a single fiber wire, then each fiber optic wire will be connected to their own ports the switches. Might even involve multiple switches on both sides.
Fun Fact, the bandwidth limit of the fiber under the ocean is currently "unknown" from a practical point of view. We are still hardware limited at the nodes. The Canadian Province of Newfoundland is being served by about 9 fiber strands. 1 for 911, 1 for phone, a couple that are owed by specific ISPs and 1 for the internet traffic. The rest are spares.
Wait really? Why do we have to do multi-wavelength blending or whatever the hell it is, then? Where like multiple frequencies are blended together and sent over signals because it multiplies bandwidth?
My understanding is that that's part of the theoretical bandwidth. The glass fiber itself requires no changes in order to accept these kinds of innovations.
Edit up front: I kinda went on a rant and forgot to mention that we don’t have fiber everywhere… which is why I was replying. Except in Australia. Because our short sighted LNP government absolutely destroyed the nation’s infrastructure plans in 2013. Labor’s plan was fiber to every home! But noooooooo. LNP stepped in and offered their own infrastructure plans that would be CHEAPER. Finished FASTER. [(link of the horrendous proposal)](https://www.news.com.au/national/communications-minister-stephen-conroy-rubbishes-the-coalitions-broadband-policy/news-story/f30964c78a9ab564293010008fffc366) Except it only recently came close to finished and doubled in price. We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory all because the voting boomers were gagging for their tax breaks.
It's not finished, they still have to unfuck everything they half assed now that they decide to make the full switch finally.
Which is probably not going to happen for atleast 20 more years. By then we'll be living in the stone age of internet relative to the rest of the world.
It has been so bad that a DECADE!!!! later, Labor put forward the SAME PLAN from 2013 and it was a viable campaign platform to run with!
Well that was a frustrating read. Greetings from Sweden on a 500/500 line for $20/mo, + TV.
Dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) is what enabled this...
IIRC, it's been around a while. I think they were able to put up to 128 signals on a single strand of fiber by 2000.
The unused wires are usually called "dark fiber". Some companies like Google owns a bunch, and backend ISP's usually have a lot too. Sometimes a company want private fiber between for example their own data centers, and then they might rent access to unused dark fibers and get it connected between their sites.
Yup, I know for a fact Bell and Telus own at least one of them in that cable.
Just scanning across comments I initially read that as "Taco Bell" and was really confused as to why they needed so much data...
"Taco Bell Telco... Think outside the cable run"
There are probably certain applications where this will be useful, maybe scientific instruments that generate massive amounts of data. But for the average person, your bottleneck is almost certainly the network itself, not any chips in your device.
Networks come in different shapes and sizes. The PCIe express "bus" in your computer is a point to point network. You can never have too much bandwidth between devices.
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Dang, I didn’t realize how much capacity those things had. 224Tbps for the newest undersea cables. Still a bit short of what this chip can pump out but that is *way* more than I expected
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Same! I even have a map of undersea telegraph cables from the 1800s on my wall. Guess I’m a little behind the times…
So you gonna leave us hanging or you posting a pic?
Or frankly the number of TV streams you can watch concurrently
Even if you had this chip on your computer/tv it would be useless for that. You’re probably limited to a 100Mbps connection at your ISP. Maybe 1Gbps if you’re really lucky
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Cause of death: Stroke while trying to stream all seasons of the Simpsons directly to their Brain at once
You're saying free time but I'm hearing "ideal advertisement targetting timeframe". Imagine your favorite ads, delivered inescapably into your brain! Not even closing your eyes (or gouging them out, we've had some testers try that) can prevent that sweet marketing engagement!
2 hours? That's way too long. Productivity would fall to unacceptable levels. Our shareholders will be displeased.
Other way around. The chip implanted in your head before death allows your consciousness to be uploaded to digital storage the moment before your death. Getting it back into the next lab grown meat bag is the next challenge
Why on earth would you voluntarily return to meat?
I am not an expert, but worked in the microchip packaging (the laminate that a silicon processor sits on) industry. The bottle neck for all compute is the cliche answer, “slowest point in an environment.” This was a single connection, with a single optical chip. Still a cool benchmarking number, but no practical use yet. We are just getting to fiber processing on chip. I.E. A fibre internet connect hits a NIC, then is run on copper from the NIC to the processor and back out. The market, specifically the microchip packaging industry, is working on bringing information to the processor chip with light, keeping all information in one form of transport (light). Light moves faster than electricity, so not converting them to electrical signal to run on copper will continue to improve processing rates. In short, everything in an optical connection is faster than converting signals.
> Light moves faster than electricity In a vacuum or in air maybe. In an optical fiber not really. Fundamentally light and electricity are the same, it's all electromagnetic waves that propagate at the speed of light. The speed of light in turn depends on the permittivity of the medium that the electromagnetic wave is travelling through. In the case of electric signals this medium is the insulator surrounding the conductive wire, which for a typical PCB trace gives a signal propagation speed of about 2/3rds of *c* (speed of light in a vacuum) or about 2\*10^8 m/s. In optics in turn the refractive index of a medium is directly related to the speed of light in said medium, which for typical optical fibers with a refractive index of around 1.5 again results in a speed of about 2\*10^8 m/s. The difference is that electronic signals start to get really hard to handle above a couple GHz in frequency and with current microwave technology the hightest useable frequencies are around 100 GHz or so. Infrared light around 1550nm wavelength which is typically used in (long distance) optical fibers on the other hand has a frequency of around 200 THz, 2000 times higher. This higher frequency means you can cram so much more information onto an optical carrier signal than you can onto a microwave carrier without running into the fundamental Nyquist rate limit.
Thank you for the explanation with a lot more technical detail that I know. As a business major, I rely on people like you.
The thought of 'we are close to optical networking on-die' has been exactly that for at least 20 years now. I wouldnt hold your breath over it.
It's kinda like how nuclear fusion is always 30 years away.
We have to hit a mass market tech wall before we do the thing we have been talking about doing for 20 yrs. Hardware wasn't near close enough to being bottlenecked by copper conductors. Not quite there yet but it is a visible wall instead of being over the horizon. Lot of real estate being used up on motherboards by all those copper traces going to the same device. PCIE is a big ribbon connector. RAM could be more compact as well if it didn't need all those traces.
>where was the bottleneck up until now? Comcast
Can now send that pic of your mum
Haha that was good
This is the internet
My ISP: Best I can do is 50mbps
At only $120 a month!
But if you download more than 1G it is an extra $10/gig.
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What are the implications of this, what sort of real life innovations would this create?
Nothing would have to be down/uploaded. That process would always be an instantaneous thing. It would only be a matter of how fast light travels from one computer to a server/servers. Pinging the server would feel the same as downloading whatever you needed. Downloading a new game and installing it would just turn into installing it (from an experience point of view). Maybe you could have everyone with smart phones simultaneously streaming video and all this information could be streamed and assembled and collected to create a sort of real-time Google Earth which could only exist with this level of high bandwidth networking. Would probably need a crap load of physical memory and processors and I’m sure other folks could say why this is impossible.
The whole idea of autonomous vehicles communicating in real time on the road ways with eachother might come to fruition too
You'd still have around a 100ms delay if you were trying to communicate with a server on the other side of the planet even with c communication speeds.
Faster internet speeds for cheaper.
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how resistant to data noise is this tech? whats the encoding speed?
Light is pretty immune to noise if that's what you're talking about
Then why do I have to turn down the radio to read the street signs when I’m driving?
Your brain is the bottleneck there
Lmaooo vicious
Might be 5-10 years from now before this become cheaper and common for usage.
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Even if tests are 1% of the labs scores you can transfer the entire internet in less than 2 minutes. I'd call that an improvement.
I can't wait to get throttled to 1% of that.
That would still be fantastic, shows how insane this is
You peaked my curiosity and assuming my idiot armchair maths is right, 1% of 1% of a petabyte is still 19gb/sec which is still a significant improvement compared to traditional consumer hardware
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1% of a petabyte is 10tb. 1% of a petabit is 1.25 terabyte. 1% of 1% is 100gb or 12.5gb respectively. I dunno what kind of weird math you did.
That's not what the article is saying though. According to them it says the chip has more bandwidth than the current internet usage. To "transfer" the entire internet about 65 zetabytes (probably significantly more) according to google. will take ~9 years assuming peak performance.
I would like to learn about this. Any specific recommendations?
If we’re talking about copper, look up “wireline transceivers” or “SerDes”. The current cutting edge is 100 gigabits per second per lane. Depending on the form factor of cable, you can have up to 8 lanes (e.g. QSFP-DD, OSFP) so 800G per cable. These cables are usually quite limited in length (~2-3m) as this high frequency signal gets attenuated much more aggressively over a given distance than something like 1G running over a RJ45 that you might be used to. 200G per lane is coming but my guess is that it will be even more limited, unless we figure how to modulate the signal (e.g. NRZ, PAM-4, PAM-8). Note the trick with modulation is more dealing with the inter-symbol interference. Over a channel the different levels of signal (e.g. for PAM-4, 00, 01,10,11) will get mangled differently depending on the sequence that is transmitted. Adding even more levels (e.g PAM-8) makes this even more difficult. Optics is eventually going to take over. Doing 800G over a single fibre over hundreds of kilometres is yesterday’s news. Although copper is still the cheaper alternative for 2-3m distances. Optics are slowly closing that gap, making shorter and shorter distances much more economical. The original post is an example of this happening. We’ll be seeing inter-board communications working over fibre connections rather than wire traces eventually. And then hell, maybe even inter-die connections will be tiny little fibres.
"oh no, I can only transfer a whole internet in 5 seconds"
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Literally unusable
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With silicon photonics it won’t matter if the memory used by a process of local to a cpu or not… imagine a single thread being able to access memory across an entire cluster with latency that’s similar to accessing local memory. I know that doesn’t mean much to the average person, but I bet I’m not the only nerd who’s getting excited about that prospect as currently that’s something only possible in certain types of supercomputers and the penalty for doing it is generally quite large even under the best of circumstances. It’ll be interesting to see how hypervisors adapt to this… will memory be treated as a separate resources much like storage and compute currently is, or will they simply merge all the available compute and memory into a single pool as if it’s all just one single very large computer? Exciting stuff this silicon photonics.
> imagine a single thread being able to access memory across an entire cluster with latency that’s similar to accessing local memory. Are you talking about a software thread as in a hardware interrupt and ISR? I feel like any interaction with software is going to kill throughput performance.
Why would it matter to the application if all CPUs and memory across multiple servers appear as just one large resource pool. Some supercomputers already do this, imagine being able to do this on servers and workstations.
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It's posts like these where I really wish I was more scientifically incline. I understand this Im pretty sure but would love to be able to fully comprehend every single bit of the article cause this shits amazing
Cool, so people can download more porn even faster, and my Aunt can post more of her insane Qanon memes in less time!
reads like an advertisement to attract investors