when will they use fiber?

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jseber1982

Enterprise SCCM\SCOM
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I was just thinkin. i wonder when all the manufacturers will start working on using fiber instead of traces on boards. I know, they have fiber channels to connect server and some drives, but when will it go mainstream to all of the components. Like, fiber from the ram to the northbridge and from there to the cpu and southbridge. Dont make any heat either.

Heck when will they do away with hard drives and make big stacks of non-volatile memory(bleh spelling). If they can fit 1 gig on a stick, im sure they could make a drive that could hold like 40 gigs or so and that would be way way faster. Could probably hit the power button and be instantly at your desktop
 
Assuming you mean fiber as in fiber-optic, you will do nothing short of creating a mess on the board.

Three major problems with putting fiber on a PC circuit board (biscuit).

1. Fiber alone doesn't do anything. You need a signal repeater and terminators to handle the data traveling on the line. You can see how this will become a mess on a biscuit with thousands of fiber lines running.

2. Speed. Fiber is great stuff for long-distance, true, but in the short distances of a PC biscuit, you're actually hampering yourself with fiber. Since fiber doesn't translate directly from the chips and connectors, you still need to handle those signals and put them on the fiber lines. With plain metal circuits, the speeds are much better. Though metal lines at distance aren't as good as fiber, within short distances they are really good. The transfer from components can be direct, without a fiber interpretor.

3. Size. A plain metal circuit line requires little to no protection to operate smoothly in a biscuit. Fiber is different, though. Electrical noise is almost non-existant in fiber, but heat and light are major factors to be considered. You'd have to insulate each line, which would mean you couldn't put the routes as close together, which would be a bit of a mess.

As for heat, heat from the mobo is negligable at best. The trace routes themselves are not terminating signals or charges, and all the really fast, constant traffic, happens in the major chips and components. Your proc is actually spinning like a top while your mobo routes are waiting for the lights to change.

As for memory, it's not a matter of speed or space. There are constraints on the maximum addressable size of memory that a computer can effectively access.

Also, as long as we rely on motorized hard-drives, CD-ROMs, and buffered components, there will always be a boot-up delay. Drives have to come to stable speed, no matter how fast the system can handle the data once it gets it.
 
well said, never thought about a lot of that. wasnt thinking about the other hardware needed to use fiber, yea i guess it would be a mess
 
I'm holding out for my first quantum computer. I'll grow it from seeds and it'll play 200 rounds of DOOM3 simultaneously while speaking to me in a sexy french SAL9000 voice...
 
is that not a bio computer your talking about there shoobie? trinary etc, fibre optics are great, can't wait til all the phone lines in the uk change to fibre optic mmmm 50mb download speed and a nice 25mb upload would be cool lol
 
yeah Utah has fiber-optics installed in some areas. Same price as cable over here they get 20mb down.....::drool::
 
Most major cities have fiber now, but hardly any use fiber in the "last-mile." House-to-house connections are usually all done in copper twisted-pair.
 
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