Stan Beer
Wednesday, 27 September 2006 17:30
Your IT -
Home IT
Page 2 of 2
Rattner demonstrated a third major innovation, the recently announced
Hybrid Silicon Laser chip developed in collaboration with researchers
at University of California, Santa Barbara. With this breakthrough,
dozens or maybe hundreds of Hybrid Silicon Lasers could be integrated
with other silicon photonic components onto a single silicon chip. This
could lead to a terabit-per-second optical link capable of speeding
terabytes of data between chips inside computers, between PCs, and
between servers inside data centres.
Rattner said that during the next decade
online software services, hosted by mega data centres with more than a
million servers, will allow people to access personal data, media and
applications from any high-performance device to play photo-realistic
games, share real-time video and do multimedia data mining. This new
usage model will challenge the industry to deliver the one trillion
floating-point operations-per-second (teraFLOPs) of performance and
terabytes of bandwidth.
“The rise of mega data centres and the need for high-performance
personal devices will require the industry to innovate at every level,
from many-core processors to higher-speed communications between
systems, while delivering better security and energy efficiency,” said
Rattner. “Solving these challenges will bring benefits to all computing
devices while creating new markets and opportunities for developers and
systems designers.”