Windows 7 - Light Driven Computing

The speed of light is as fast as it gets, and IBM researchers are exploiting that fact to give supercomputers a boost. They’ve made the smallest-yet silicon chips that use light to transmit information.
Most parts of the chip resemble those found on any other commercial chip. The parts that process or transform information—in other words, the parts that do the actual computing—still deploy electrons moving through semiconductor gates. But the interconnects, the lines that shuttle information between different areas within a chip, are drastically different. Instead of shuttling electrons, which can slow down significantly when the interconnects heat up, they shuttle light. That’s because light is easy to contain and loses less information as it travels. The researchers hope that this quick communication will make possible the first exascale computers—that is, computers that can perform a billion billion computations per second, 1,000 times as fast as today’s speediest systems.
To read more please see this link:
How It Works: The Light-Driven Computer | Popular Science

I'm surprised this wasn't developed sooner with fiber optics being around for some time......or has it?

mr pc,
Not sure but it seems that the technologies at this microscopic level are relatively new.

There was another thread here about photonic/quantum computing Quantum Computing Chip Built.

Very interesting though. Will be amazing once it's developed properly.

So, will we be able to overclock it?

Yes I see a market for sending more juice to the lasers.....lol to speed up the light ??

Speed up the light

The new Motto: Come to the light

So what if we bend some rules of physics as we know them. Rules as they say are meant to be broken.

You'd just be sending all your data in to the future in the process.

But the dark side has cookies...

~Lordbob