IBM has unveiled nanophotonics chip technology which integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, to enable computer chips to communicate using pulses of light instead of electrical signals. According to IBM the breakthough could lead to significant improvements in performance at both the chip and system levels. The new IBM technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, is the culmination of a 10-year research effort across IBM’s global research labs, and is expected to enable terabyte-per-second devices. The research is part of IBM’s Exascale computing programme, which is creating a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations – an Exaflop – in a single second.
The Exascale supercomputer will be approximately one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today, IBM said. “The development of the Silicon Nanophotonics technology brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much closer to reality,” said Dr Chen, vice president, science and technology, IBM Research. “With optical communications embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level is one step closer to reality.”
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2 month old article, but I thought about how much faster our consumer level PCs would be if we had this. I'd also take a guess that the heat dissipation would most certainly be cooler.
Though speaking of uber new technology for the future, it reminds me of every time my boss me tins having to use a floppy disk XD they were still in use when I was a tiny little Redack but I remember CDs being used all the time :D and then every so often we find something that needs a floppy disk today. Just die you outdated technology >.<
Even VGA is being phased out of modern productions of laptops and video cards now. You can still find them.
I did some cable drops for some company a while ago and they still used floppies to install some database program on their Server 2003. Sometimes people just use the old stuff because it works.
I just realised I made a terrible typo in my reply and the iPad corrected it to something stupid...
Anyway. Yeah I know, I just wish ancient relics of a time forgotten would go away. As if my job isn't work enough I have to spend forever finding a floppy drive!
