photonic x86 CPU design

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 02:53:48 +0200, keith wrote:

Wake me up when somone makes a usable one.

did I wrote usable ? I wrote 'in the labs today' to make it clear that is
not science fiction like this optical x86 cpu

--
the penguins are psychotic
aka just smile and wave

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 08:45:39 +0200, koko wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 02:53:48 +0200, keith wrote:

Wake me up when somone makes a usable one.

did I wrote usable ? I wrote 'in the labs today' to make it clear that is
not science fiction like this optical x86 cpu

Optical switches have been demonstrated, as well. My opinion isn't
changed; yawn.

--
Keith

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 15:33:17 +0200, keith wrote:

Optical switches have been demonstrated, as well. My opinion isn't
changed; yawn.

And what exactly is your opinion ? :]

--
the penguins are psychotic
aka just smile and wave

In article ,
says...
On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 15:33:17 +0200, keith wrote:

Optical switches have been demonstrated, as well. My opinion isn't
changed; yawn.

And what exactly is your opinion ? :]

I thought I made my opinion rather clear; I'll care even less by
the time either technology is useful.

--
Keith

In comp.sys.intel Bill Davidsen wrote:
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.

Blank DVDs aren't practical for backing up a whole terabyte, but they're
down to about ~$100/TB in bulk ($40-50 per 100 disks/~450gb).

--
Nate Edel http://www.cubiclehermit.com/

"I do have a cause, though. It is Obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

Nate Edel wrote:
In comp.sys.intel Bill Davidsen wrote:
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.

Blank DVDs aren't practical for backing up a whole terabyte, but they're
down to about ~$100/TB in bulk ($40-50 per 100 disks/~450gb).


In the home and SOHO markets, however, DVD is a very common
backup media - when backups are done at all.

A large part of it is due to the fact that in such places there
is no one to do backups except ordinary users - many of whom are
quite comfortable with burning a DVD, yet intimidated all to hell
by tape drives.

Forget about the fact that tape backup has been around since JC
and the boys went out for pizza - to non-techies they are new and
intimidating gadgets.

Rob Stow wrote:
Nate Edel wrote:

In comp.sys.intel Bill Davidsen wrote:

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.


Blank DVDs aren't practical for backing up a whole terabyte, but they're
down to about ~$100/TB in bulk ($40-50 per 100 disks/~450gb).


In the home and SOHO markets, however, DVD is a very common backup media
- when backups are done at all.

A large part of it is due to the fact that in such places there is no
one to do backups except ordinary users - many of whom are quite
comfortable with burning a DVD, yet intimidated all to hell by tape drives.

Forget about the fact that tape backup has been around since JC and the
boys went out for pizza - to non-techies they are new and intimidating
gadgets.

Don't forget that tape backup is expensive, that tapes are not used for
anything else while DVD is used on many systems for data transfer, the
individual media are cheap, and the cost of a 2nd drive is minimal.
Having a 2nd tape drive (or a reasonable size) is very expensive, not
having a 2nd tape drive means you don't have a backup if the 1st one
fails. I've seend that twice in 30 years, and both times the manager's
career took a major hit for not having a backup drive.

There's no help in sight, DL DVDs are too expensive (thanks to DRM for
that), and 25-30GB Blueray or HD-DVD blanks are also unlikely to be
affordable. Any tape format large enough to be useful is expensive, both
drive and media. You can put a TB of disk in for $1k, but you can't do
a decent backup system for that.

What the world needs is a cheap four bay external usb drive case, put in
four big drives as RAID-5, take a backup and put it in the safe. Don't
know of any.

Anyway, DVD is used instead of tape because you have it anyway, tape has
no other use but backup in most cases.

--
bill davidsen
SBC/Prodigy Yorktown Heights NY data center
http://newsgroups.news.prodigy.com

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Rob Stow wrote:
Blank DVDs aren't practical for backing up a whole terabyte, but they're
down to about ~$100/TB in bulk ($40-50 per 100 disks/~450gb).

In the home and SOHO markets, however, DVD is a very common
backup media - when backups are done at all.

A large part of it is due to the fact that in such places there
is no one to do backups except ordinary users - many of whom are
quite comfortable with burning a DVD, yet intimidated all to hell
by tape drives.

There's also a big factor of labor being cheap compared to hardware; very
much the opposite of professional installations.

--
Nate Edel http://www.cubiclehermit.com/

"I do have a cause, though. It is Obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Bill Davidsen wrote:
There's no help in sight, DL DVDs are too expensive (thanks to DRM for
that), and 25-30GB Blueray or HD-DVD blanks are also unlikely to be
affordable.

DL DVDs are falling in price, though slowly, largely because there's little
need for them in the consumer sector, and there aren't many drives. I think
you're wrong about BR/HD-DVD prices: it will take a couple of years for the
market to shake out and quantities to build, but I fully expect they'll fall
to a comparable cost-per-byte than current DVDs, even if they cost enough
more to produce than the $40/100 that current DVD-/+R costs.

What the world needs is a cheap four bay external usb drive case, put in
four big drives as RAID-5, take a backup and put it in the safe. Don't
know of any.

Software RAID5 is pretty easy, and there are any number of 4-bay external
USB and firewire cases, although those are expensive. Frankly, I don't trust
single-parity enough to use it for backups, though. I'm not sure if a 4+2
RAID6 would be adequate, but given 4 drives for backup, I'd do mirrored
pairs.

--
Nate Edel http://www.cubiclehermit.com/

"I do have a cause, though. It is Obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

Nate Edel wrote:

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Bill Davidsen wrote:

There's no help in sight, DL DVDs are too expensive (thanks to DRM for
that), and 25-30GB Blueray or HD-DVD blanks are also unlikely to be
affordable.


DL DVDs are falling in price, though slowly, largely because there's little
need for them in the consumer sector, and there aren't many drives. I think
you're wrong about BR/HD-DVD prices: it will take a couple of years for the
market to shake out and quantities to build, but I fully expect they'll fall
to a comparable cost-per-byte than current DVDs, even if they cost enough

Certainly much lower cost/byte! There is no way a new and higher
capacity medium in the same form factor can stay at equal or higher
cost/byte, in all previous cases, the new version have eventually passed
the previous generation in this regard, afaik.

more to produce than the $40/100 that current DVD-/+R costs.


What the world needs is a cheap four bay external usb drive case, put in
four big drives as RAID-5, take a backup and put it in the safe. Don't
know of any.

Software RAID5 is pretty easy, and there are any number of 4-bay external
USB and firewire cases, although those are expensive. Frankly, I don't trust
single-parity enough to use it for backups, though. I'm not sure if a 4+2
RAID6 would be adequate, but given 4 drives for backup, I'd do mirrored
pairs.

With four drives, you'd have the same capacity and better redundancy
with a 2+2 RAID setup instead of 1+1:

You could then lose any single drive or any pair of drives except for
both the data drives. It might also be possible to encode the two
"parity" drives in such a way that they could also be used to recover
the actual data?

I.e. is there a code in which you can encode two blocks of data on four
drives, and recover the data blocks from any pair of surviving drives?

Terje

--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"