Thursday, November 06, 2003

[ via Yahoo ]

Using a technique called capacitive coupling, Sun engineers have been able to transfer data between components at 21.6Gbit/sec. -- about half the speed of the 800-MHz front-side bus on Intel Corp.'s latest Pentium 4 microprocessor, "without even trying," Gustafson said. The rate at which data can be transferred between components like the computer's memory and processor has increasingly become a bottleneck for the computer industry, since the silicon and wires connecting computer components have simply not been able to transfer data as quickly as new components can process it.

"It's a choke point," said Gustafson. "For the longest time there was no hope in the industry of getting past that choke point."

But proximity communication could represent a work-around to this problem. Gustafson predicted that within a few years, the Sun Labs team could achieve much faster transfer rates using this technique. "We could do up to a trillion bits per second, in and out of a chip, which starts to match the speed of the computer," he said.

Jon 9:03 AM Permalink