News Israeli Processor Computes at Speed of Light

From Reuters:

HERZLIYA, Israel (Reuters) - An Israeli start-up has developed a processor that uses optics instead of silicon, enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.

Lenslet said its processor will enable new capabilities in homeland security and military, multimedia and communications applications.

"Optical processing is a strategic competitive advantage for nations and companies," said Avner Halperin, vice president for business development at Lenslet.

"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."

More here

Optical processing has been touted for years, but it looks as if it's about to come to fruition. Cool!

Numbers? hows this:

 

wONDER HOW MUCH IT GONNA COST

 

autonomous military systems-> Sounds like Skynet. Wouldnt you just love to see all those terminators run round?

 

Exciting probably be at least a decade before we see anything remotely practical for home users though. Perhaps you could share processing power between several houses like they were discussing a while back, not to fond of that idea though.

 

!

for a second there you scared me, calling the thread "Israeli Processor Computes at Speed of Light". if that were true they would have made instantanious computing. ...just think of it, the last computer you would ever have to buy. with that kinda processing power you might even be able to pull a decent frame rate in morrowind!

 

I think when they say 'computes at the speed of light' they simply mean 'computes using light' If you think about it light isn't much faster than an electrical signal so it's not exactly like computing at warp 10 (ie infinite velocity ). The main advantage I assume must be that light doesn't have electrical resistence whereas electrons do.

 

Nothing can travel at the speed of light within a medium (such as air). Of course I have no idea how these are built, so I won't say anything futher .

 

Re: !

I doubt that

 

Doesn't electric potential travel at the speed of light?

 

Virtually, yes.

 

1/3rd of the speed of light in a vacuum iirc. I expect we'll see processors using light to transfer data across chips and probably between chips at some point fairly soon. Driving all that wire isn't good, and it causes nasteh capacitance effects on long interconnects.

Don't really see their technology being used any time soon, though it is conceivable that it may be employed to reduce power levels in chips. Current transistor technology is very mature, you'll have a hard time persuading people to give that up any time soon

Alaric.

 

There was a big article in focus magazine last year or the year before which was dedicated future computing they recon the next big thing will be using light as a way of transmitting data. They estimated it will be around 10 years before we start seeing such machines, untill we are able develop and use quantium based computers, optical computing seems the best option atm. Its all very exiting any way