D
David Schwartz
It doesn't work that way. The question is based on lots of false
premises.
DS
It doesn't work that way. The question is based on lots of false
premises.
DS
B
Bill Davidsen
Gavin said:
The question would be irrelevant if it reflected the reality of the
hardware. Given a CPU 20x faster than state of the art at that time you
could run an X86 emulator on it and the real instruction set wouldn't
matter, it would still be faster than current. If it were some subset of
x86 that's a bonus, not a requirement. You don't say "cost effective"
but the assumption is there, I think, 20x faster in any usable way would
probably do it.
If a photonic computer of reasonable speed and cost existed, I suspect
that there would be a quick port of at least one O/S to it and x86 would
be come history in the high end market. Clearly if you port something
like Linux you get a lot of tools which either just work or work with
little effort. That's because there are 32 and 64 bit versions in use so
many of the problems have been fixed already.
You could assume that if someone were building any new CPU today it
would be LSB order 2's complement, so even though there are assumptions
in some programs they are unlikely to fail.
I believe 32 bit Windows was ported to Alpha, so given a reason it could
be ported to a new CPU as well. I'm not sure that even a chance to own
the workstation market would be a reason, the Alpha market was too small
to support itself, and most buyers don't spend the money to buy the
fastest CPU available now.
The real question is if this new system would be so fast that people
would go to the effort to port anything BUT Linux, since it would have
to make sen$e to do so. Linux would get ported because (a) there are
lots of recent ports to serve as examples, (b) people will do it to
prove they can, and (c) you can get a grad student to do almost anything
for a little money and a thesis topic.
B
Bill Davidsen
Nick said:
My first thought was HyperTransport. But 10GHz isn't that fast... people
are using that for ethernet in labs, based on silicon.
B
Bill Davidsen
We are in agreement on that one. Note my earlier post on x86 emulation.Yousuf said:
K
koko
maybe, just maybe someone got their hands on this ones blueprints
(espionage?) http://www.lenslet.com/products.asp
K
keith
Do you mean "how is it *supposed* to work"?
Remember, you can cut a hologram in half and still have a complete
picture, though the S/N ratio is reduced. With this in mind, it's
really a method of spreading information over a wide area. Many
redundancy methods do similar things. It does sound kewll though. ;-)
K
keith
"working?" What does it do, exactly.
K
keith
Well, if you have a 50 year head start, but are nowhere near the
finishing line, perhaps you are running in the wrong direction?
Well, CNF hasn't been around 50 years. Perhaps you'd rather invest in
that? ;-)
K
keith
With how many NAND4s inbetween clocks? GHz<>GHz.
K
keith
I think you've been staring at too many "little shiny objects".
Y
Yousuf Khan
Yeah but how does laser-burning pictures onto photographic plates
relate to computer memory, especially RAM?
Yousuf Khan
relate to computer memory, especially RAM?
Yousuf Khan
K
Keith R. Williams
Pictures are made from pixels, which are bits.
The application then was mass storage.
B
Bill Davidsen
I think the practical application would be backup. Some media whichYousuf said:
would be fast enough and cheap enough to take regular backups.
I can buy a TB of IDE disk for ~$1k, but I can't buy a practical backup
system any cheaper than another two (or more) sets of drives, in some
way removable. To balance the cost of backup to the cost of main storage
I would guess reusable media would need to be ~$100/TB, use once no more
than $25-35/TB so you can sell it into the home/SB environments.
Y
YKhan
Keith said:
OIC, so it's not so much as a replacement for RAM or Flash, but more as
a replacement for CD/DVDs, etc.?
Yousuf Khan
K
Keith R. Williams
Would you believe tape? ;-)
S
Stephen Fuld
YKhan said:
The designs I saw could be considered that, as long as you are talking about
the RW varieties of those devices. They used crystals of something like
Lithium Niobate to record the data. They also had some "odd" access
characteristics. When you flashed the laser to read a block of data, you
got a huge chunk (~100 MB) at a time, with extradinary transfer rate, but it
put so much energy into the system that it had to cool down for several
seconds before being accessed again. Of course, this was just one proposed
device and AFAIK, it never made it past the prototype stage.
M
Mike Smith
Keith said:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an Escalade full of holographic
memory plates.
K
koko
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/ser...00085000013002622000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes
stores, "data retention times of up to several minutes at room temperature"
K
keith
;-) The salesman of the silly system is no doubt the owner of said
Escalade.
K
keith
Wake me up when somone makes a usable one.