IBM has a prototype chip that features enough bandwidth to download 500 HD movies in just one second, or all content held by the Library of Congress in just about one hour.
This claim boils down to a parallel optical transceiver that is first to boast the capability of transferring one trillion bits (1 Tbps or about 116.4 GBps). According to IBM, the chip is about eight times faster than any parallel optical component that is available today and delivers a 100,000 times the "raw" speed that is equivalent to the bandwidth that is typically consumed by end users today (10 Mbps).
IBM said that key to improving the speed of the chip was adding 48 holes (optical vias) to a standard 90 nm CMOS, which provides access to 24 receiver and 24 transmitter channels. The fact that it is based on optical communication features gave the chip its name - the Holey Optochip. IBM says the 5.2 mm x 5.8 mm chip can be fabricated using today's silicon manufacturing techniques, which gives the technology instant scale. Apparently the chip is also very power-efficient at a power consumption of just 5 watts.
There was no information when or if this chip will be put into production.
Right on, man. Good post.
is this just to show off tech?
is it part of something... am i missing details... am i misreading it...
because all i see is that they are telling us what it can do, but not telling us its application.
Then you'd face HDD/SSD write speeds
Japan 10-125mb
Euro 25-125mb
American 56k-1.5mb -_-
Rest of the world 56k-20mb
It will be amazing how fast you can hit your bandwidth cap.
You can always seed them at the bay for us xD
Just as soon as the 100TB hard drives hit the market!
That's okay, because the L1 Cache can keep up with it (; all 100k or so.
In reality though you would use this chip in a server, connect it to 100 10Gbit Lan lines for further distribution. I wonder how they plan to set the rest of the system up though, but if they are as energy efficient as they are claiming there is no reason to not use them for a tenth on their bandwith and still make a significantly more powerful backbone depending on the distribution.