[Jiggyhound]

I wonder what other future innovations will be coming along, those which have been predicted anyway. I see the development of molecular transistors in the next few decades, then subsequently, nano technology

[diamondgeezer]

What're the chances that, despite the new chips supposedly costing about the same to manufacure, we'll be paying about five times more for this optical thingy than we do for old-skool hardware?

[Flipside]

Of course, that's commerce

[Jiggyhound]

probably...

[demon442]

EDIT

Teach me not to read the rest of the page...

[Ace]

Originally posted by Jiggyhound
problem is, It wont get any faster now

Two words:
Quantum Computer

[Fineus]

Very good and all, but will it run Windows XP?

Seriously though - this is some impressive stuff. I was beginning to worry that technological breakthroughs were a thing of the past and that everyone was to preoccupied elsewhere to care about advancing human creations. Nice to know I can play Doom 3 with decent frame rates now.

[Singh]

Yup.......ub3r fast computers.......

Now it is 500% garaunteed that developers are going to make games that cause it to hit ~5 FPS.

[Taristin]

I'm waiting for one of these to be used in a GPU on a video card first...

[Turnsky]

Originally posted by Kalfireth
Very good and all, but will it run Windows XP?
 

if we know how the mind of bill gates works, we can expect an iteration of Windows to run on such hardware..

as soon as we can clone human limbs, so we can literally pay an arm and a leg for it.

[WMCoolmon]

Damn.

Sandwich, you really were serious about getting a new video card, weren't you? A bit underhanded, this...

[Setekh]

Finally, optical computing. This has been a research item in Alpha Centauri for years, I'm surprised it took them this long to catch up.

[Flipside]

LOL Masters of Orion have been using this stuff for years as well, I'm sure I saw prototype, really basic Optical computer on Tomorrows World when I was, like, 13

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Kalfireth
Nice to know I can play Doom 3 with decent frame rates now.

yeah, but you'd have to pay a small fortune for the chip


kasperl:  no, light is faster.  that's the reason there's fiber optic backbones going across the oceans, and not twisted pair copper.  OK well there's other reasons too, but yeah: light > electric

[Bobboau]

acording to the article the optical chips should cost about the same as the current ones

[Setekh]

Now that is an achievement. Fabrication at reasonable costs doesn't usually characterise kick-arse technology like this.

[ChronoReverse]

Erm, electrons move slow.  Really slow.

Electricity moves fast enough to be considered speed of light.  i.e. the signals move that fast (and yes it's due to that electrons colliding effect).



I see it that using light as the signals has the benefit that we don't need copper traces to conduct them so it can get smaller.

Interestinly enough, at a certain point (where electrons start behaving like waves), we might be going back to electrons again since they have a smaller wavelength than light (which is why we have electron microscopes).

[Grey Wolf]

Haven't they had really expensive military hardware running on this same principle for years?

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Bobboau
acording to the article the optical chips should cost about the same as the current ones

remember the Pentium 4 prescott?

they said it would cost $175, but when it was released it cost $500.

you can't go with what articles say prices will be...

[Grey Wolf]

This is the company that Intel bought up a year or two ago, isn't it?