The Gilder Friday Letter of 06/08/07
[unedited, uncut, unfiltered, uncritiqued]
gilder.com | Issue 298.0/June 8, 2007
HEADLINES:
- The Week / Critical Path Components
- Friday Feature / Al Gore's Hell on Earth
- Friday Blogger Bonus / Identify the Bottlenecks
- Readings /
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The Week / Critical Path Components
George Gilder (Gilder Telecosm Forum | 5/28/07): The key bottleneck is reading and interpreting the packets with some 48 bytes (and with IPv6 even larger headers), classifying them, looking up (CAMing) their addresses, routing them, and managing their traffic?all at wirespeed up to 20 or even 100 gigabits per second, flawlessly. This is an absolutely necessary complement of the optical revolution. It will remain on the leading, industry-defining edge as long as traffic and bandwidth increase.
Similarly, as high-resolution video streams increasingly dominate layer seven and push to the extremes the performance of buffer memories and their management, Sigma Designs (SIGM) media processors and their rivals (ZRAN) must function at megapixel gigaspeed and are also on the critical path. It is the missing element that enables Internet HDTV and all other video and graphics-intensive applications that flow at the speed of eyes rather than of fingers. This function too couples fiberspeed to digital electronic processing speeds and breaks a crucial bottleneck in what they are calling Internet 2.
In other words, as the exaflood meets the telecosm, the exacosmic network and media processors will become the pivotal devices all across the network. They target the crucial bottlenecks where the electronics is coupled to the speed of fiber. They make a digital device fiber-ready and high-res video ready.
By contrast, TCP termination and ordering of packets, encryption-decryption, virus scanning, intrusion detection, XML file processing and such can be done at relative leisure on amply buffered packets at more or less the fingerspeed of the end user. If necessary these functions can even be done in software with a fast CPU.
Therefore, my premise from the beginning has been that the network processor and the media processor are the critical path components, the necessary complement of the all-optical network, the missing element that completes the fiber optic exaflood.
But comparing the two, the network processor is less dispensable. Clever buffering and remote processing at the datacenter, dispatching deltas (changes) rather than every pixel, can render a satisfactory video experience, even HD or 3D, without meeting the full fiberspeed challenge. But if you don't read the headers and route the packets fast enough you might as well keep the network in its copper cage.
Compared to EZchip (LNOP), Cavium Networks, Raza Micro, and Sigma are valuable contributors. But, you could still have an all-optical network without them. Without EZchip and its diminishing band of rivals, the all-optical network depends on a different ASIC for every application and every interface. As the entire network, end to end, every node, moves to IP and Ethernet, the NPU is a device that can achieve microprocessor volumes.
That is why EZ is my big pick, while Cavium and Raza, (and possibly SIGM) are nice paradigmatic complements.
My big further bet is that performing the critical path function provides a better foundation for moving up the stack than does performing an upper level function that has less exacting and remorseless wirespeed constraints. Atiq Raza and Syed Ali of Cavium beg to differ. That is what makes a race. I placed my bet while Raza was still at AMD (AMD) and Ali of Cavium was at HP (HPQ) (as I recall).
Netlogic (NETL) meanwhile is even farther out on the limb, trying to move memory into the processing money. The legendary David Patterson outlined the strategy long ago at Berkeley with his iRAM project. Micron has tried to do iRAM for decades, without success to date. But iRAM is a paradigm, and memory is on its own leading edge with its own critical path purity and discipline. It may well turn out that EZ and NETL (and Micron/MU) are the polar winners and Cavium and Raza get bogged down in the middle competing with Intel (INTC) and AMD.
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Friday Feature / Al Gore's Hell on Earth
Maggie Gallagher (06/07/07): Al Gore calls it, "The Assault on Reason," but his brand of environmentalism sounds a lot more like a new form of faith.
In his book "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore confesses that global warming: "offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise?
"When we do rise, it will fill our spirits and bind us together. Those who are now suffocating in cynicism and despair will be able to breathe freely. Those who are now suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives will find hope." When we rise, "we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge."
Transcendence, epiphany, loss of meaning, hope. No, this is not really about politics, or science either, is it, Al? Al Gore's new role is prophet, calling us urgently to convert on carbons or perish, lest rising temperatures create Hell on Earth.
Environmentalism, as a movement, seems to breed such prophets. The mother of them all was Rachel Carson, whose 100th birthday we just finished celebrating. "Silent Spring," which launched modern environmentalism, began with an outright fable, a secular Eden: "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings." But lately, an "evil spell" threatened to "silence the rebirth of new life." Many of Rachel Carson's scientific claims -- such as that pesticides were causing cancer -- were not consistent with the scientific evidence, points out John Tierney in the science section of The New York Times this week.
In a fat, rich country like America, the kind of "chemophobia" Carson championed only led us to waste money on various kinds of nonessential cleanups. In the developing world, the fear of DDT has led to massive human deaths from malaria over the last 40 years. But somehow the halos on environmental prophets remain unaffected by the human destruction their dogmas wreak.
I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific case for global warming. But three things about global warming give me pause.
1. It transforms the United States, as the world's most successful economy, into the chief evildoer in the world; 2. It justifies a massive extension of government power to regulate all aspects of our lives; 3. It makes having children a sin against the Earth. (Indeed, China recently justified its coercive one-child policy on carbon-reducing grounds.)
Check out Maggie?s blog:
realclearpolitics.com
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Friday Blogger Bonus / Identify the Bottlenecks
George Gilder (Gilder Telecosm Forum | 5/28/07):
The processing of packets is a difficult matter;
it is not just one of your holiday games;
you may think that I am beginning to natter;
when I tell you that packets have multidimensional names;
embodied in sesquipedalian headers;
that some super computer just has to read;
encompassing ever more symbols and letters;
parsed not at finger pace, but fiberspeed.
So before sending your investment checks;
Identify the bottlenecks.
Check Out George?s Gildertech Blog:
blog.gildertech.com
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Readings /
The Weekly GTI
gtindex.com
The Future of Security in New York City
spectrum.ieee.org
A New Display Lengthens Gadget Life
technologyreview.com
Hollywood Goes High Tech
forbes.com
Top 8 Indicators That You'll Line Up for an iPhone
gizmodo.com
Wireless energy promise powers up
news.bbc.co.uk
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