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Wouldn't infrared be acceptable for data transmission?
Not sure how applicable it is, but the IrDA (Infrared Data Association) protocol tops out at only 16Mbps.
>GigaIR: 512 Mbit/s – 1 Gbit/s, NRZI, 2-ASK, 4-ASK, 8b/10b
> Modern transistors, which function as a computer’s brain cells Who's the target audience for this analogy? If you understand what a brain cell is then you probably know what a transistor is too. I would bet that more people know what a transistor is than what a brain cell is.
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Not sure how applicable it is, but the IrDA (Infrared Data Association) protocol tops out at only 16Mbps.
False. >GigaIR: 512 Mbit/s – 1 Gbit/s, NRZI, 2-ASK, 4-ASK, 8b/10b https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association
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You don't need to know the details of a brain cell to get the analogy. If I say "transistor" to my mom, she wouldn't be able to tell me what it is. If I say "It's like the brain cells for the computer", she would probably understand that "Ah, so a computer has many transistors that helps it think", which seems good enough for an article with a broad audience. > I would bet that more people know what a transistor is t…
A CPU do not think. It follows precise instructions.
On a scale of zero to really big deal. How much of a big deal is this?
Photonic can only be up to 20% faster... And I'm talking about a fully photonic cpu, not an hybrid one that has a light/electricity translation cost.
How did you come up with that number? The speed of travel? That's not really the main bottleneck in current computer architectures, at least not yet.
Using photons would enable quite different architectures that we haven't even conceived of yet.
Wavelength of the light emitted by these devices: ~4000nm
Latest generation commodity CPU transistor structure size: 7nm
Add to that that photons really don't like being trapped; you essentially need a delay line and optical amplifier to hold them indefinitely (that's essentially the core technology my whole PhD thesis centers around), it makes them a really impractical thing to store bits with. Things with a rest mass can be stored easily, though. Things like, say, electrons!