One of my areas of interest is AI. The transference of Human level intelligence into a "computer" brain. Once famous futurest is saying within 10 years it should be possible because PC's now are 1% of a human brain. Hate to tell him, we already have the technology. A hundred "blades", or even a "baby" supercomputer(There is one that has 100+ pc's in a normal pc size case) already can be purchased off the shelf. So least having a non-mobile version is easy. Actually packet processors are getting to the point they make the idea solution for grey-matter replacement. Built-in 10Gig Ethernet ports, and 16 64-bit processors means we can string a large number of these little guys togeather with not much glue. The issue we always get is "cooling".
In the body, one of the things that helps to distribute "heat" and keep everything in balance is the blood. Even PC's now can easily be cooled with Water Cooling, with a simple kit. The product is done by Cooler Master and is called AquaGate Mini. The heat is easily dumped outside. This idea for your PC you have in your bedroom, or in your home office and want low-noise and dont want the machine to overheat when the aircon is off.
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=1313&cid=3
But the problem is, in a "brain" replacement, our array of 30 x 16 x 64bit packet processors and memory are really going to generate some heat. Water is just not enough, and we really dont want to heat up the blood that much. So a "aux" cooling system is mandantory. Also the "fan" is a major problem of reliability.
Enter the solution, the "new" blood to solve our problem, is "liquid" metal. With the ability to carry 16x the heat of water, and no worry of conversion to steam to about 2000 degrees. (New meaning to blowing your top if your using water cooling). The product is invented by a company called NanoCoolers. Non-toxic, no moving parts for the pump, it allows us to increase the amount of computing power in a small space. So the dirty little secret in all computing is heat is the biggest limiting factor to making things go faster. Now we can increase the density and power signficantly while keeping things below melting.
http://www.nanocoolers.com/products_cooling.php
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Thursday, May 19, 2005
The "Extreme" Motherboard
Everyone has heard of the rapid progress that graphics and CPU's have made. Now we can have two of the highend graphics cards in our pc, and even let them help each other render the latest game schene.
One of the key ways that PC's are moving ahead is PCI-Express.
First a little bit of bus history
IBM Channels - The beginning of all things - Think Firehose size cables
ISA - The beginning of
Derived PCMCIA/Compact Flash
EISA - A upgrade to ISA, short term fix for making ISA faster
MCA - Dead End
PCI - One of the first complete redesign in PC history
AGP(x) - A mid-life fix for the slowness of PCI to make graphics card happy.
PCI-X - Faster Clock and Wider (64 Bit)
PCI-Express - Wow a totally new and radical design
PCI-Express is a "serial" bus. Most people have heard of SATA/SATA2. Well good old PCI has had a "rewrite" at the hardware level. The lovely thing is it keeps the software infrastructure of PCI.
PCI-Express comes in a few different sizes. The number of "lanes". So you have x1, x4, x8, x16, and eventually x32 and x64. One lane is "equal" in speed to a PCI bus, but only need two pairs of wires. So a x8 or x16 blows away PCI as well as PCI-X, as well as AGP.
So the perfect motherboard, first the CPU's, dual/dual is the base line, so we are talking 2 CPU Chips each with a dual processor. AMD or INtel is fine. So that gets us a quad CPU. Lots of memory is ok. But the best part is the "slots". Forget the number x1, x4 type slots.
The perfect motherboard would have 6 x8 slots, preferably with support for 3 SLI bridges. Yes we are talking the ability to have 6 of the biggest N-Vidia or ATI cards known to man.
But you say "how". Well the "secret" to doing this is already being made.
A company called "PLX Technology" www.plxtech.com makes a part that will allow us to take a x8 (Most MB have dual x8 that support SLI today, and expand it. The part is called a PEG8532. This is a complete "switch" for PCI-Express. Allowing us to talk to each card at full speed. So must faster than a bridge chip.
Of course I would recommend you use water cooling, since the total heat output is going to be the biggest issue. (Hint for this one, HeatPipe, or WaterCooling)
In addition, this allows for large ammounts of other types of high capacity cards. A X8 slot can serve 10G ethernet quite well. Or a high-end RAID card can use the capacity well. So many things to consume bandwidth.
One of the key ways that PC's are moving ahead is PCI-Express.
First a little bit of bus history
IBM Channels - The beginning of all things - Think Firehose size cables
ISA - The beginning of
Derived PCMCIA/Compact Flash
EISA - A upgrade to ISA, short term fix for making ISA faster
MCA - Dead End
PCI - One of the first complete redesign in PC history
AGP(x) - A mid-life fix for the slowness of PCI to make graphics card happy.
PCI-X - Faster Clock and Wider (64 Bit)
PCI-Express - Wow a totally new and radical design
PCI-Express is a "serial" bus. Most people have heard of SATA/SATA2. Well good old PCI has had a "rewrite" at the hardware level. The lovely thing is it keeps the software infrastructure of PCI.
PCI-Express comes in a few different sizes. The number of "lanes". So you have x1, x4, x8, x16, and eventually x32 and x64. One lane is "equal" in speed to a PCI bus, but only need two pairs of wires. So a x8 or x16 blows away PCI as well as PCI-X, as well as AGP.
So the perfect motherboard, first the CPU's, dual/dual is the base line, so we are talking 2 CPU Chips each with a dual processor. AMD or INtel is fine. So that gets us a quad CPU. Lots of memory is ok. But the best part is the "slots". Forget the number x1, x4 type slots.
The perfect motherboard would have 6 x8 slots, preferably with support for 3 SLI bridges. Yes we are talking the ability to have 6 of the biggest N-Vidia or ATI cards known to man.
But you say "how". Well the "secret" to doing this is already being made.
A company called "PLX Technology" www.plxtech.com makes a part that will allow us to take a x8 (Most MB have dual x8 that support SLI today, and expand it. The part is called a PEG8532. This is a complete "switch" for PCI-Express. Allowing us to talk to each card at full speed. So must faster than a bridge chip.
Of course I would recommend you use water cooling, since the total heat output is going to be the biggest issue. (Hint for this one, HeatPipe, or WaterCooling)
In addition, this allows for large ammounts of other types of high capacity cards. A X8 slot can serve 10G ethernet quite well. Or a high-end RAID card can use the capacity well. So many things to consume bandwidth.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Matrix Technology - Low Cost Mass Market "Rapid" Production
The question is on in "DARPA" to make a "replicator". A desktop "lab" that would allow you to "make" anything you wanted, on demand.
Well, its going to take a long time to get to that point, but something that can really shake up production and manufacturing technology has arrived. Its called HVPF™ Print-Forming.
Its done by a company called EOPLEX. What's so special about it. It allows you to product complex "devices" that include physical, mechanical, electrical, and "plumbing" elements, either in ceramic, or polymer. http://www.eoplex.com
So what are the application examples:
1. A new "P4" socket - Based on EOPLEX ceramic ink -
Image getting the perfomance of "million" dollar "test" sockets - Your front-side bus could run at multi-gigahertz speeds, and the cost of the socket be reasonable.
2. Ceramic PCB for handphones - RF loves ceramic. Being able to do a very dense RF friendly PCB or substrate solves all types of packaging and RF issues.
3. Bio-Mems - In Singopre one of the universities has created a custom fish-tank that uses bateria to "scrub" the various waste products directly out of the water. The trick is making a filter that holds that bateria. With the polymer, a "bio-reactor" can be created that hold standard or custom bacteria, and reagents and perform useful work. From disease detection thru keeping your fishtank clean. You may think the fishtank idea is "low" value, but the price on the current product is in the multiple thousands. Having a "disposable" catridge system that can be mass producted is great for the consumer, and the "technology".
4. New generation printheads - HP and Canon all have issues in manufacturing enough "printheads". The technology gets even more complex, and needs very custom equipment and tooling to make the current printheads. This technology could lower the cost, and push up the qaulity even more.
There's many more earth shattering products that can be made with this process. Stay tuned, and I will write more.
Well, its going to take a long time to get to that point, but something that can really shake up production and manufacturing technology has arrived. Its called HVPF™ Print-Forming.
Its done by a company called EOPLEX. What's so special about it. It allows you to product complex "devices" that include physical, mechanical, electrical, and "plumbing" elements, either in ceramic, or polymer. http://www.eoplex.com
So what are the application examples:
1. A new "P4" socket - Based on EOPLEX ceramic ink -
Image getting the perfomance of "million" dollar "test" sockets - Your front-side bus could run at multi-gigahertz speeds, and the cost of the socket be reasonable.
2. Ceramic PCB for handphones - RF loves ceramic. Being able to do a very dense RF friendly PCB or substrate solves all types of packaging and RF issues.
3. Bio-Mems - In Singopre one of the universities has created a custom fish-tank that uses bateria to "scrub" the various waste products directly out of the water. The trick is making a filter that holds that bateria. With the polymer, a "bio-reactor" can be created that hold standard or custom bacteria, and reagents and perform useful work. From disease detection thru keeping your fishtank clean. You may think the fishtank idea is "low" value, but the price on the current product is in the multiple thousands. Having a "disposable" catridge system that can be mass producted is great for the consumer, and the "technology".
4. New generation printheads - HP and Canon all have issues in manufacturing enough "printheads". The technology gets even more complex, and needs very custom equipment and tooling to make the current printheads. This technology could lower the cost, and push up the qaulity even more.
There's many more earth shattering products that can be made with this process. Stay tuned, and I will write more.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
The MAID Did it - Tape is Dead
We all "hate" backups, they take to long, and the media is problematic. After all it did start life as sticky tape. (Referece to the "Secret Life of Machines"). So what I generally do for backups is to use USB based hard drives. Since max capacity is 400Gigabytes now, and expanding it looks like to a terabyte, it makes a idea way of plug and go. If you havent priced the cost of high-perfomance tape drives, and tapes, you should. Its very expensive. A small autochanger and drive, plus some tapes exceed 15K US$. (30K S$). So you can buy alot of US$100+ drives and usb enclosures. Backup speed with USB is fast, and the drive can be plugged into anything from a server to a workstation. But for true automation and enterprise class storage, the answer has traditionally been a SILO. A SILO is the size of your typical agri silo, but its full of 1inch tapes, and 8 or more drives. Lot of weight, log of space, and still its tape. In my previous life, I did product definition and product marketing in this segment. Wonderful to play with even the small versions of the technology, but alas expensive. So what happens when we combine the latest in hard drive technology, with the need to store alot of data. The answer is a "MAID".
MAID stands for "Massive Array of Inactive or Independant Disk". Thing about it, with a SATA interface, we can now stack 896 drives in one normal rack. The power to the drives can be managed in software, keeping most powered down, and with "first" generation product you get 224Terabytes of storage. Of course with next generation anounced drives your looking at 896Terabytes, pontentially this year in the same or similar product. Cost per "terabyte" will go down even further. The other benefits are "fast" access. If the drive is powered down, takes no time to spin him up, and if he's up, then access is disk speed. Also we can put 4 to 8 racks in the place of one silo. Lower maintence, full automation, and automatic redundancy is all included.
So all of the above exists today, see COPAN Systems, http://www.copansys.com/products/
There packaging is unique, and innovative. You have to go thru a few photos to get to the "meat", but in the end you see it. Each "blade" of the system is mulitple drives. So in a nomal raid you could get 8 or 16 drives in 3 to 4U, now you can turn them on edge and get 8X the number. Very very good design.
Now, for my value add.
Lets look at the next generation of COVAN. Since I'm not a staff, I can write it up for all to see. (By the way I believe that some of the management that COVAN has done is great).
First SATA is good, so we stick with that.
So specs are:
896 1 Terabyte SATA-2 Drives
Each Tray has a "Octal" SATA controller with PCI-Express connection.
The backplane then connects to a large-scale PCI-Express Switch. Allowing us to rack and stack as many or more drives. This switch is composed of off-the-shelf high-perfomance PCI-Express chips.
All of the above is connected to a Cavium Network Processor.
16 64 bit MIPS on one die, plug 10Gigabit Ethernet out.
We run linux, plus a set of management software that further expands the
functions of the MAID to make it a complete archival storage server offering WEB/SMB and NFS suppport.
The lovely part of it, is all the silicon exists today, and the drives are already anounced.
MAID stands for "Massive Array of Inactive or Independant Disk". Thing about it, with a SATA interface, we can now stack 896 drives in one normal rack. The power to the drives can be managed in software, keeping most powered down, and with "first" generation product you get 224Terabytes of storage. Of course with next generation anounced drives your looking at 896Terabytes, pontentially this year in the same or similar product. Cost per "terabyte" will go down even further. The other benefits are "fast" access. If the drive is powered down, takes no time to spin him up, and if he's up, then access is disk speed. Also we can put 4 to 8 racks in the place of one silo. Lower maintence, full automation, and automatic redundancy is all included.
So all of the above exists today, see COPAN Systems, http://www.copansys.com/products/
There packaging is unique, and innovative. You have to go thru a few photos to get to the "meat", but in the end you see it. Each "blade" of the system is mulitple drives. So in a nomal raid you could get 8 or 16 drives in 3 to 4U, now you can turn them on edge and get 8X the number. Very very good design.
Now, for my value add.
Lets look at the next generation of COVAN. Since I'm not a staff, I can write it up for all to see. (By the way I believe that some of the management that COVAN has done is great).
First SATA is good, so we stick with that.
So specs are:
896 1 Terabyte SATA-2 Drives
Each Tray has a "Octal" SATA controller with PCI-Express connection.
The backplane then connects to a large-scale PCI-Express Switch. Allowing us to rack and stack as many or more drives. This switch is composed of off-the-shelf high-perfomance PCI-Express chips.
All of the above is connected to a Cavium Network Processor.
16 64 bit MIPS on one die, plug 10Gigabit Ethernet out.
We run linux, plus a set of management software that further expands the
functions of the MAID to make it a complete archival storage server offering WEB/SMB and NFS suppport.
The lovely part of it, is all the silicon exists today, and the drives are already anounced.
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