Intel debuts hella-zippy optical future

Intel has announced the development of an integrated, end-to-end, silicon-based optical system that it says may drive down the cost of high-speed, error-free interconnects to under a dollar per port — and it leaves Chipzilla's Light Peak interconnect in the dust. "Optical as a technology is coming, and its coming very fast," …

[Andrew Tyler 1]

Units

It comes up often enough that the "Library of Congress" ought to become an official metric. How big is a Library of Congress anyways?

[Daniel Evans]

Using maths...

About 11 TB's worth of data, apparently, working on the info in the article.

Unless a "Terrabit" is a different, more earthly, version of a Terabit.

[Anonymous Coward]

$1 per port?

An how much to rip out the 10,000+ cable runs we have and replace with Optical (with all it's own problems)

At least copper is a bit more forgiving when trodden on, slammed in drawer, screwed up in bads.

It's good, but has many problems to overcome.

[John Robson]

Don't rip out

Just run alongside...

Then the fibre is protected by all that copper ;)

I've not had much fibre failure, but then I use it in protected settings - of course toslink *style* connectors for the last metre would probably be acceptable (do we need 1Tb/s to the desktop?).

[itsallcrap]

I can cope with measuring storage capacity...

... using 'Library of Congress'es, but as soon as a significant number of people start measuring transfer rates in tweets per second I'm binning my computer and going to live in the woods.

[Trevor_Pott]

I nominate this...

...for greatest post of all time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen

But, as "meaningful information" has been displaced by "information", I'm not sure that it makes much difference.

How about Paris-Pics / sec?

[Sooty]

It's not just data

for it to be really useful, it also needs to transmit some degree of power as well, or it can never really be used in low, or entirely bus, powered devices.

[Captain Thyratron]

Simple solution.

Some standard will probably arise that uses fiber-optic cabling for data and a few copper wires for power, sort of like how 13W3 video used three coaxial cables for color channels and ten copper wires for other miscellaneous signals. This won't get rid of copper wires--just reduce how many we need and free it up for other things. (Of course, big power lines already use aluminum instead in order to save weight.)

[The Prevaricator]

data

Will people please remember that "data" is plural not a singular. It's not that hard.

Tweets per second as a measure of data transfer rate is a bit stupid. MegaTweets per second might be marginally more sensible though...