Star Sun Researching Super Fast Laser Processors
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 25th Mar 2008 16:33 UTC, submitted by irbis
SUN Microsystems As computers chip continue to decrease in fabrication size, manufacturers such as AMD and Intel are researching new ways to overcome physical barriers. Die size, performance, operating frequency and heat are all major obstacles in the semiconductor industry. Sun Microsystems announced that in partnership with Luxtera, Kotura and Stanford University, it is working on an ambitions project to move data transmissions from electrical signals over copper wires to pulses of light using lasers.
E-mail Print r 8   14 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/f27
Thread beginning with comment 306614
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE: Rather Intel than Sun...?
by ahmetaa on Tue 25th Mar 2008 19:45 UTC in reply to "Rather Intel than Sun...?"
ahmetaa
Member since:
2005-07-06

At least they have innovative ideas like Rock and Niagara instead of beating the old x86 donkey for years.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5

Detlef Niehof Member since:
2006-05-02

At least they have innovative ideas like Rock and Niagara instead of beating the old x86 donkey for years.

Would there be any technical advantage in dumping the x86 legacy instead of on-going compatibility? If so, could you provide some more explanation and/or a link to an informative web page?

Thanks heaps,
Detlef

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

trembovetski Member since:
2006-09-30

Why would you have to dump the compatibility? Sun didn't when it introduced the new chips - the apps which worked on Ultra Sparc work just fine on Niagara (and will on Rock).

Dmitri

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

Read more of this thread... >
xiaokj Member since:
2005-06-30

Would there be any technical advantage in dumping the x86 legacy instead of on-going compatibility?

Well, x86 may be fine for most applications, but virtualisation has always been one of x86's troubles. Although the introduction of hardware support for it helps much, it is not going to be perfect since it was not designed with Popek and Goldberg virtualisation requirements in mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualization_requ...

Another fact is that the x86 is now a RISC chip core emulating a CISC chip. Why not just produce to a RISC design, instead of wasting cpu cycles on translating them?

Moreover, the sheer size of the mindshare in x86 is distorting the market. A few years before, I heard of peripheral devices using MIPS as their intermediate processor between the raw device/data and the system. Reasons cited for such a decision was cost and ease of development. Personally, having tried a bit of MIPS and x86 assembly, the MIPS architecture is easier to work with. If more resources had been diverted away from x86 to MIPS/SPARC/POWER, Apple would not have to move away from PPC.

Last but not least, it is the trouble of legacy. Although backwards compliance is touted as a feature, it can be a horrible curse. Many old code contain bugs that are next to impossible to eradicate. Also, it helps in maintaining binary blobs -- a reason why Windows 64bit series are seldom sold is because of its reliance on 32bit binary blobs, which means much less drivers. While linux has had much ease in the transition to 64bit, nVidia drivers posed such a problem. In fact, the lack of nVidia drivers for PPC hindered mac to linux OS migrations in the past.

ps: been editing but simply cannot make links that don't show the full url, only the title of document

Edited 2008-03-26 13:24 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

Read more of this thread... >