New Material Sets Stage For All-Optical Computing 53
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the International Business Times: "Researchers have made a new material that can be used to guide waves of light, a breakthrough that could lead to ultra-fast computing. Georgia Tech scientists are using specially designed organic dyes that can process and redirect light without the need to be converted to electricity first. ... 'For this class of molecules, we can with a high degree of reliability predict where the molecules will have both large optical nonlinearities and low two-photon absorption,' said [Georgia Tech School of Chemistry professor Seth] Marder."
According to the article, using an optical router could lead to transmission speeds as high as 2,000 gigabits per second, five times faster than current technology.
Re:Optocouplers (Score:4, Informative)
optoelectronics
If they don’t have to be converted to electricity first, then where are the electronics in this?
A better name is “photonics”. :)
Re:OS abstraction wtf (Score:1, Informative)
Where did you learn it was an OS abstraction? That's just ... sigh.
Bytes are the smallest addressable unit of memory the CPU can handle. It doesn't matter if the memory controller only does cache line fills or whatever, memory addresses are in units of bytes.