🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Oct16.160719@is.morgan.com> berlin@is.morgan.com (Alexander Berlin) writes:

>Let me disagree. Don't forget that the speed of light is not the only source of
>network communications bottleneck. In my understanding, a very little portion
>of latency is due to the light speed limit. On a local network with a physical
>range of say 10 miles, the light would make a roundtrip in about 0.1 msec 
>(10 * 2 / 186000 ) wich is quite acceptable. 

Perhaps I'm way off key here, but I don't understand why the speed of light
forms any bottleneck.  It is always possible to build faster networks, by
simply sending more bits in parallel.  Are we discussing only a particular
network architecture?

>If I remember correctly, the theoretical speed limit of a network packet 
>is something around 0.8 * c (eighty percent speed of light).

Pretty close...

>So, as processors become faster, so do the routers and gateways. We are also going
>to have networks with much higher capasity which will increase the size of
>packets and reduce the number of packets required.

>It is my understanding that in the nearest future (10-15 years) the processors 
>(and not the networks) will be the bottleneck in the RPC or any client-server
>scenario.

If we can assume that the routers' and gateways' improvements show similar (but
not superior) speed increases as the processors, it would seem to me that this
cannot happen.  Parallelization will help in some areas, but some of the tasks
are necessarily serial, and so can only improve proportionally to the
improvements in processor speeds.  If this is a limiting factor now, it seems
that it always will be.

>-- 
>Alex Berlin                     
>berlin@is.morgan.com