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Hardware Technology

Superfast Optically-Based DSP Announced 140

Posted by CowboyNeal from the light-speed-processing dept.
dawgnut writes "An Israeli venture-funded startup has announced a digital signal processor chip that uses optical connections rather than silicon transistors. The result is a very fast chip with massive throughput for calculating fast fourier transforms that wastes very small amounts of power as heat. Interesting applications (or frightening ones depending on where you come down on the security vs. privacy thing) for remote sensors, biometrics and homeland security stuff." The prototype being showcased is rather large, but Lenslet is hoping to have it shrunk down to a chip within five years. Update: 10/31 00:22 GMT by CN : Whoops, we ran this yesterday. Mea culpa.
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Superfast Optically-Based DSP Announced More

Superfast Optically-Based DSP Announced

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  • Beowulf (Score:1, Funny)

    by Coyote67 ( 220141 )
    Ahh screw it. I can't afford to imagine it.
  • Super Fast Dupe too. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/143420 3&mode=thread&tid=137

    • Re:OFN (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 1000StonedMonkeys ( 593519 )
      Now I'm not a subscriber, so I don't know if this functionality already exists, but it seems like it would be handy if when subscribers saw articles early they could mark them as duplicates for the editors to check.
      • Pretty fucking good idea. Except that every story would get marked by trolls if there were no restrictions.

        Maybe base it on Karma. Or give out moderation points for stories. Dupe -1, Old News -1(ex: article dated 18 months ago.)
        • if it's a dupe, it's a dupe. you can't have moderators who are idiots saying, "well, it's almost not a dupe" and then mod up to 1 "interesting", or 1 "funny", or 5 "it's not really a dupe".

        • Re:OFN (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jerde ( 23294 )
          The other possibility might be for /. editors to... well, actually READ slashdot.

          Nah.

          - Peter
          • >> The other possibility might be for /. editors to... well, actually READ slashdot.

            Thats too much for them, they are actually ... only humans
      • There is this capability. Subscribers can see most stories before anyone else, and an e-mail link is provided so that subscribers can alert an on-duty editor to the problem. I e-mailed about this post and one other one in the past, but I guess "on-duty" doesn't always mean that since it's never helped.

  • Make it smaller within the next few years (Score:3, Funny)

    by Atmchicago ( 555403 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @07:18PM (#7353637)
    An old soviet joke was as follows: And yet another achievement by soviet science - they have perfected the world's largest microchip!
  • If only they would develop an optical superfast chip to detect dupes...

  • Flashlight Fun (Score:3, Funny)

    by Thargok ( 661682 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @07:19PM (#7353654)
    I can see the LAN parties now... "Will you stop it with the flashlight?!!!! Why did I buy that window kit?"

  • I have to admit (Score:2, Insightful)

    by NightWulf ( 672561 )
    For such a small nation, with access to a hell of a lot less funding than american conglomerates. These Israeli companies sure do make some intresting inventions. From supercomputers, to genetic engineering, etc. etc.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • You might be surprised at just how much access to funding they do have. Check this [wrmea.com] out. Think of this technology as a a sort of return on American taxpayer dollars. That we'll have to pay for. :-)
      • What does US foreign military aid have anything to do with this? Lenslet is a privately held company and has nothing to do with US funds.

        But since the subject was raised.. Ahh, WRMEA. A website dedicated to "balanced and accurate information concerning U.S. relations with Middle Eastern states". Funny how their home page has a live counter (!) of dollars given to Israel, but no corresponding counter showing how many dollars are given to Egypt, Jordan, or whatever. And they do get a lot of money. They also

        • It wasn't really meant to be a jab at Israel. I'm quite aware of the Israeli side of things. The majority of US foreign aid goes to two countries, Israel and--surprise--Saudi Arabia. The rest pales. By the way, that's US foreign aid, not US foreign military aid.

          I wonder about that bit concerning 3/4 of the money gets spent in the US. Not being an economist it's hard for me to see why the money needs to go outside the country first at all....

    • Re:I have to admit (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Froug ( 710553 )
      Israeli companies also make [slashdot.org] a lot of [slashdot.org] fraudulent [slashdot.org] claims. [slashdot.org]
      If all claims were to be believed, then the Israelis have had optical and quantum computers for half a decade, can break any encryption, have unbreakable encryption, and an AI in junior high.

      I have no doubt that some Israeli companies do develop interesting innovations, but not every sensational technology press release that finds its way on to Slashdot is entirely honest.

  • Dupe. (Score:1, Redundant)

    by univgeek ( 442857 )
    Dupe from two days ago!! [slashdot.org]

    Can you remove this already?

  • Yes my friends (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Bendebecker ( 633126 )
    This is a repeat of this thread [slashdot.org].
  • So according to the article, this DSP is really really fast because it uses lasers. To do what? To calculate? To transmit data from place to place? I'm curious as to how they can do computations using the lasers (which is what seems to be implied by the article)
    so there.

    --dw

    first on-topic post ;-)

  • There is a nice picture of it here [lenslet.com].

  • Memory is irrelevant for this kind of "processor" (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is NOT a Harvard architecture part - this isn't fetching instructions from RAM and executing them, like a regular DSP would.

    Think of this more like an FPGA - you have a device that is configured for a specific processing algorithm, and data is fed in at wire rate and processed at wire rate.

    An example of how a device like this might be used may be in order:
    I'm trying to find a radar pulse buried in the noise coming in from my receiver. I want to know the phase delay of the radar pulse - how long from
  • I was almost impressed by this, until I read up on the technology on their website. It will have a pretty limited use as it only has 8-bit precision vector/matrix MAC which is where the 8 teraflops come from. This will be fine and all for just video but it isn't much of a quantum leap for anything else (besides having an optical core). I mean it has power, but there are other chips out there that do more with greater precision numbers.

    Deja vu?
    • yeah, but it's a start. I mean, chips wheren't always 32 bit.

    • I mean it has power, but there are other chips out there that do more with greater precision numbers.

      You mean that there are other chips out there that do less with greater precision.

  • [...] a digital signal processor chip that uses optical connections rather than silicon transistors. [...] The prototype being showcased is rather large, but Lenslet is hoping to have it shrunk down to a chip within five years.

    I'm sure they didn't choose Mr. Lenslet at random for the job of shrinking optical an processor ...
  • I saw "super-fast optical BSD" and my mouth watered.

  • What changed?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Daath ( 225404 ) <lp.coder@dk> on Thursday October 30, 2003 @07:46PM (#7353890) Homepage Journal
    /.'er: Whoa. Deja vu.
    Trinity: What did you just say?
    /.'er: Nothing. Just had a little deja vu.
    Trinity: What happened? What did you see?
    /.'er: A post on slashdot about a CPU. Then another just like it.
    Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same post?
    /.'er: It might have been. I'm not sure. What is it?
    Trinity: A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
    /.: Figures. Perl sucks.
  • Wow, the light and mirrors in this chip can even produce duplicate slashdot postings!
  • It's not a chip, it's a module the size of a palm pilot. It *might* be a chip in 5 years. Big difference.
  • Interesting applications (or frightening ones depending on where you come down on the security vs. privacy thing:

    You have to consider that almost anything can be abused, and in many cases the worst are the ones that we aren't prepared for. I'd say this is no more threatening than many other methods out there.

    Einstein didn't predict the nuclear bomb, though it certainly made him regret his contributions
  • Dupes have reduced dramatically from 'those times'?

    Kudos to editors for bringing the dupe rate that low

    Now, Come on... pour me with karma :D
  • Are there people who deliberately submit old stories to Slashdot over and over again just to see if they can catch the moderators out? Just wondering.


  • Great, I can just see it now: somehow the PPC edition of this future chip will still be a few mhz slower than the licensed x86 counterpart... :0

  • New Israeli processor operates at the speed of light. A Dual-Chip system expected to be a minimum requirement for Half-Life 3.

  • Processing at the speed of light (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eples ( 239989 ) * on Thursday October 30, 2003 @10:23PM (#7354827)
    enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.

    Ummmm, don't electrons travel that fast anyway?

  • Can't you UN-POST something? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by simetra ( 155655 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @10:43PM (#7354929) Homepage Journal
    Really, how hard can that be. Or do you get paid per post?
  • How difficult is it to write a script that searches last week's submissions and notifies the submitter about the subject ? say, 80% word similarity with previous subject should present a dialog to the submitter saying "look, this topic has been posted yesterday; press ok to submit something new on it; press cancel to cancel the submission".

    And then, slashdot reviewers will immediately see the dupe and reject it.
  • Most often by far, the digital signal processors are used in mobile phones these days. They are used for the speech compression and channel coding.

    Would be nice to get more talk time...

  • ... they'll be able to dupe articles once slashdot runs on one of these puppies!
  • That was a terribly interesting parenthetical aside (or frightening ones depending on where you come down on the security vs. privacy thing), don't you think? I mean, where DO you draw that line?

    There is a rising clamor for the Patriot Act to be dismantled, for much the same reasoning, but should it be?

    Where does privacy end and security begin, and visa-versa? Is the threat from internal terrorists over? Are we secure in our homes, workplaces, and skyscrapers; or, does the threat continue?

    If we are not y

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