Intel shows off 'disaggregated' rack of servers, storage, and networking At the "Avoton" Atom C2000 chip launch on Wednesday in San Francisco, Intel showed off several of the components of its Rack Scale Architecture working in concert and also announced a partnership with Microsoft to push the idea on its Windows platforms for data centers and on the Windows Azure public cloud. Intel has already …
Specifically using optics all the way down to the server level
long speech, though all good here is a link to that particular segment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2qSUobKdhU#t=18m45s
(if youtube doesn't jump straight to the segment just skip to 18 min 45s into it)
"Copper is the energy sucking devil"
"Our math tells us we will use 16,000 times less energy per bit to process by moving from pure copper based systems to photonic based systems"
A current example he used was a 6Tbps fiber cable, vs a handful of copper cables that can do 300Gbps.
cool stuff, at least to me.
dunno about HP. Poor hit rate these last few years. However, Intel has done well. I vaguely recall them saying they were working on cheap optical NICs years ago. Doing high speed optical comms on servers is a good first step in perfecting the technology so prices drop and performance rises. For those inhabiting Oz cities, it means FTTP is the way to go as consumer end devices can use all the traffic that can be sent to them by then. Lets hope it's not consisting of some big brother type show in 3D. Real life is already like that thanks to the spooks and the gullible pollies.
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