Optical Processors Process at the Speed of Light

[fraudulentpeanut 0]

Please check out the full story here as I hate quoting: Optical Processing

I know that this is kind of old news but I didnt see that anyone discussed it at all in the forums. I wanted to bring it up because it is the next generation in processing power and would render processing clocks obsolete. It is probably more than 20 years down the road before it becomes pracital use, however, when it does, we will never have to worry about computing speed again. I wonder what this will do for the global processor market as they will all be computing at the same speeds. I can just immagine that we will try to make it go faster.

[tdktank59 0]

Please check out the full story here as I hate quoting: Optical Processing

 

I know that this is kind of old news but I didnt see that anyone discussed it at all in the forums.  I wanted to bring it up because it is the next generation in processing power and would render processing clocks obsolete.  It is probably more than 20 years down the road before it becomes pracital use, however, when it does, we will never have to worry about computing speed again.  I wonder what this will do for the global processor market as they will all be computing at the same speeds.  I can just immagine that we will try to make it go faster.

215942[/snapback]

very cool cant wait till ive got one in my machine lol ill own anyones **bottom** lol

[Cerebral Stasis 0]

Thanks for posting it, Fraudulentpeanut.

It seems that every few decades, there is a breakthrough that makes computers, and other technology as well, smaller and faster. First it was the vaccuum tube, then it was the transistor, then it was the microchip, and now this may be the next big thing.

If this technology is combined with the Light Drive, it could mean computers that more or less can calculate most anything quickly enough that a human could not recognize any computation lag at all. I just hope that I'm still young enough to enjoy it when (and if) it all becomes a reality.

[amhso 0]

Isn't the microchip just a million/billion lil transistors? Anyways that's pretty cool. one day the power of a full pc nowadays wll fit in our pockets

[bureX 0]

Well, kind of, but the microchip does not contain any real transistors. The microchip is just a piece of silicon at first, and it is processed in such a way that machines melt small areas of it and place P & N type materials that eventually create a transistor. More and more transistors are connected and form a microchip. However, no real - already made - transistors are used, and I think that's the main difference.Back on topic... This is indeed a nice find! Processing data at the speed of light will surely be a great improvement in speed! Although, I'm not sure if lasers heat very much... Is heat going to be a big problem here or not? Anybody?

[selim 0]

Oooh an interesting find. Can't wait till computers are that fast. I too wonder what will happen to the processor market. Do you think it will decrease in value? Especially for computer processors since every computer will be running at the same speed there'd be no need to upgrade. And once they manage to shrink this even small then it'll be placed onto graphics cards, sound cards, motherboards and any other board that computers use. Before I read the article i thought it was about the LightDrive system Cerebral Stasis linked to. And if the two really do get put together and used to build computers of the future then I can only imagine what we'll be able to do with them.Guess I better start saving money now to afford the upgrade.

[Cerebral Stasis 0]

Is heat going to be a big problem here or not? Anybody?

It all depends on the power of the lasers. Since there would be so many lasers in such a small space, it's possible that quite a bit of heat would be generated, but if the lasers were very low-power (which would be most likely, for efficiency and economic reasons), it may not produce much heat at all. For example, laser pointers don't produce any detectable heat, and the lasers used in an optical chip would be thousands of times smaller and much weaker.
In any case, optical circuits wouldn't have the same reaction to heat that silicon circuits do, since light isn't noteworthily affected by heat. The only danger would be if the chip itself would melt, but since the idea has come this far, I'm pretty sure that potential problem would have already been pondered and solved.

[bureX 0]

A transistor also doesn't heat at all when it's working as a stand alone component in a small e.g. amplifier device, yet thousands of them on a small surface as a processor do , also, laser printers heat up pretty well, don't they? But of course, they wouldn't even try to build one of these if you would need a liquid nitrogen cooling system for it (but I'm still very interested in the solution to this problem), so we won't just enjoy lightning fast speed (literally), but also less heating and more quieter computer systems (finally!). Maybe they will even cut down on the power usage of the optical processor and it will eventually be used in laptops that will run for days without recharging! mmm... can't wait

If anybody is interested to transfer some analog data VIA a laser (voice/music in this example), you can do it in just a few steps: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Enjoy!

[Arigato 0]

It seems we are closely reaching our limit of how fast processors can go. After light speed I don't know how much faster we could go. In fact, even at speeds below light speed humans wouldn't notice much difference from that of computer with even less that speed for average use but it would still be very good for projects that involve alot of computing power like decrypting. Soon computers will be so good that people won't need to spend thousands in upgrading their computer for playing games are using simple applications.

[bureX 0]

We will manage somehow :DFor example, today, we use multiple processors or one processor with multiple cores! Besides, it has been proven that Einstein?s theory that says "There's nothing faster than the speed of light" is incorrect. Many scientists made a super-fast laser (with speeded up electrons) that is faster than the speed of light, and in this case, we are using lasers, so some speed improvement is possible! If not, then we can shrink the size of the laser sources and, therefore, speed things up a notch!

[Cerebral Stasis 0]

To your earlier comment about laser printers creating heat, laser printers use lasers hundreds of times more powerful than any laser that would be used in an optical chip. Also, silicon circuits, holding electricity and passing it along by conductivity, allows for some energy to escape in the form of heat, thus causing the chips to become warm. An optical chip, however, wouldn't lose near as much energy to heat (most wasted energy would instead be lost as light), but if the lasers, packed together, did create quite a bit of heat, I doubt it would be much more than any of today's silicon processors.As for the speed of computing, there will always be programs that can push the limits of a processor. As was said, though, one could always upgrade a computer by simply giving the processor more and more cores, thus breaking down the task and increasing the overall efficiency/speed.