Technology

That's the idea. It's pretty worthless for home use, but for AI workloads, it might make sense, the problem is that it's not quite scalable yet.

Essentially, if you've got 256Tb/s going over 200km of fiber, that means that there's quite literally 32,000,000,000 bytes (32GB) "in flight", living on the fiber at any period of time.

So it's essentially it's a revolving sushi belt of bytes, roughly as large as London (inside M25), moving at nearly the speed of light.

Of course, it doesn't have to be the size of London. You could wind it into something about the size of a softball. Theoretically.

It's a cool idea and Carmack is no doubt a brilliant man. It seems far fetched but it's kind of been done before... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

Then all the necessary mineral prices will shoot up 3,648%.

Fibre is just strands of extruded glass; one of the most common substances on earth.

Sure beats the blood minerals needed for memory, and to scale up, you just extrude longer strands.

there is a bit of surplus of fibre wire in Ukraine, i hear… /s

could be cheaper than enterprise grade DIMMs.

You can carry multiple wavelengths over a single strand.

It's being proposed for AI literally. As in AI doesn't TECHNICALLY need RAM, it could also use SAM and this stuff could provide excellent sequential access performance.

I'm assuming that the point is the bandwidth.

goes looking for HBM bandwidth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory

It says that HBM 4, which came out one year ago, can do 2 TiB/s.

Were you talking to John Carmack or John Connor?

If you read the article, it's sequential access but that's fine for AI use.

It's delay line memory. It was common back in the days of vacuum tube computers.

A little bit, but normally Token Ring didn't just keep data running around in a circle on and on

Token Ring works more like a roundabout, where you enter at a given computer on the ring and then exit at another device. Without looking, I suspect that, like Internet Protocol packets, Token Ring probably had a TTL (time-to-live) field in its frames to keep a mis-addressed packet from forever running around in circles.

Also, I'm assuming that an implementation of Carmack's idea would have only one...I don't know the right term, might be "repeater". You need to have some device to receive the data and then retransmit them to keep the signal strong and from spreading out. You wouldn't want to have a ton of those, because otherwise it'd add cost. On Token Ring, you'd have a bunch of transceivers, to have a bunch of "exits", since the whole point is to move data from one device to another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

John Carmack is on drugs?