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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 327.0/February 8,
2008
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / George Gilder: Transitioning to Fiber
- Friday Feature / Steve Forbes: It’s the Dollar Stupid
- Friday Blogger Bonus / George Gilder: Challenging
EZchip
- Readings /
The
Week / Transitioning to
Fiber
Gilder Telecosm Forum Member (2/2/08): Who will benefit
from the coming exaflood?
George
Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (2/2/08): My rule is
to look for the fiberspeed critical paths. Increasing proportions of traffic
have to move at 10 gigabits per second or faster and will be accessed not by
fingers but by machines (image processors, cell phone teleputers, graphics
engines, coders-decoders, serdes, touch screens, gesture sensors). These
machines must function at speeds exceeding speeds of the fiber datapaths. This
is difficult and requires unique capabilities that tend to transcend the
competition.
Central processing will occur in protocol-neutral virtualized remote
datacenters across the increasingly all-optical network. Everywhere will arise
the problem of interfaces between heterogeneous media. The interfaces cause
delays, meaning that media processors will have to function even faster than
fiberspeed.
Moore's law silicon cannot meet this challenge with mere biennial
doublings of transistor density. It will entail architectural and analog
innovations, such as general purpose graphics processors, CMOS optics, copper
chip metalization layers, content addressable memories, new backhaul systems,
modulator-based projection displays, multicore and multicell and tile
processors, 3D silicon structures, image based I-O,
optical transponders, on-chip test engines, transceivers, cable optics, and
fast-hardware trusted platform modules for security on the edge….
Gilder Telecosm Forum Member (2/3/08):
Much
of the wireless backhaul in Europe is microwave... and in the U.S. it's copper
T-1 lines. Transitioning to fiber (from the tower to the aggregation node or
central office) will be a long battle.
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (2/3/08):
That's true. It will not happen over
night. But in China and India they have laid a lot of fiber to the tower; and
in the U.S., the T1s and their TDM frames are becoming ridiculously uneconomic
as they multiply. Greenfields wireless systems will probably use fiber and some
upgrades will also take advantage of its increasingly cost effective bandwidth,
which is now far cheaper per bit than copper or microwave. Under the pressure
of the exaflood, fiber becomes the cheapest solution. With PONs and metro
10-gig, fiber is gradually becoming the favored medium virtually
everywhere.
RELATED READING: Estimating the Exaflood
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=4428&program=Technology%20and%20Democracy
To
read more posts by George Gilder and the Gilder Telecosm Forum members, visit http://www.gildertech.com/ and become
a Forum member today.
SPECIAL OFFER
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The Gilder Telecosm Forum To learn how to join this powerful network of
talented, tech-savvy investors and thinkers online daily to debate, discuss,
and decode new and emerging technologies and share valuable and actionable
investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com
today. |
Friday Feature / It’s the Dollar Stupid (and
Taxes, Too)
Steve Forbes, Forbes.com (2/8/08): Uh-oh. Washington wants a
stimulus package to rejuvenate the slowing U.S. economy. Usually such programs
are full of nice-sounding but wasteful spending initiatives, as well as tax
breaks that have a weak, one-shot impact on the economy. President Bush should
therefore offer a deal: strong, pro-growth measures as the price for signing off
on the usual unproductive stuff. But the White House has panicked and will go
for things that won't solve the problems plaguing us. The President
should recover his nerve and verve. Otherwise, he will blast away a positive
economic legacy.
The
most potent, constructive medicine would be for the Bush Administration
to stop its Jimmy Carter-like weakening of the dollar. A feeble dollar means
inflation--witness what's happened to commodity prices over the last four
years, the most prominent being oil, which has almost quadrupled in price. This
ain't a case of supply and demand. Four years ago an ounce of gold would buy
you roughly 12 barrels of oil; an ounce today would get you roughly 10
barrels--that's hardly a 300% real price increase. A weak dollar also brings
about economic distortions, such as the (now disastrous) subprime mortgage
orgy. President Bush should announce that we will defend the dollar and make it
stronger. The Fed should announce that it will let the federal funds interest
rate float, at the same time removing some of the excess money it created in
2004--05.
The
bottom line: No strong economy has a weak currency.
An
additional and powerful shot in the arm would be to make permanent--and,
indeed, deepen--the tax cuts on dividends and interest that expire in 2010.
Reduce the levy on dividends and capital gains from 15% to 10% and you'd see a
sharp boost in equity markets, as well as in consumer and business confidence.
Business capital outlays would boom, as would entrepreneurial startups.
Former Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey recently came up with a good idea in
the Wall Street Journal to unclog the tightening credit arteries: Allow
manufacturers and retailers to open up their own in-house banks or financial
institutions that could borrow and lend money. These entities could make loans
to customers that now frightened banks are increasingly loath to make.
Unfortunately, approval for this type of entity has been paralyzed by the fight
over Wal-Mart's attempt to open such a bank. Unions and banks opposed it, and
the proposal has languished….
Read on:
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/global/2008/0211/009.html
________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / Challenging
EZchip
George Gilder,
Gilder Telecosm Forum (2/5/08): The Linley
Seminar [held January 30] was a celebration of the ever expanding Carrier
Ethernet market with its growing reach from the metro toward the Enterprise and
even into wireless, access and backhaul. No one any longer claims that a
complex hardwired ASIC can subdue the ever multiplying herds of cats emerging
from the ever proliferating standards bodies around the world. Everyone calls
for more programmability and as the stakes rise, ever more players emerge to
challenge the now imperial EZchip with the new notion that NPUs are not
programmable or configurable enough…
To read George’s entire report from the Linley Seminar, including comments
on Xcelerated, TPACK, Lightstorm Networks, Freescale,
Raza Micro and Netronome, visit
http://www.gildertech.com/
and subscribe to the Gilder Telecosm Forum member today.
__________________________________________
Readings /
George Gilder and Robert Flanagan to Keynote 2008 Executive
Forum
http://www.ad-hoc-news.de/Aktie/12717381/News/15321095/ADVA.html
A Memory
Breakthrough: Two firms have doubled the capacity of phase-change memory, a
likely replacement for flash
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20148/?nlid=851
Earthlink CEO says cutting off Helio was a "difficult decision"
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/08/earthlink-ceo-says-cutting-off-helio-was-a-difficult-decision/
Moving
in on the Wii
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20150/?a=f
Gilder Technology Index
http://www.gtindex.com/
IBM plots
global-scale shared computer
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/08/ibm-plots-global-scale-shared-computer-to-host-entire-internet-a/
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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