World's smallest laser cracks open the door to THz CPU race
By Vlad Savov 
posted August 17th 2009 5:49AM
posted August 17th 2009 5:49AM
posted August 17th 2009 5:49AM
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and the majority of people will still just use them to surf porn.
what else would you use a computer for?
I use my Core i7 rig to emulate 8 bit Nintendo games.
Yes, but much faster! ;)
A THz processor could give you an orgasm and you wouldn't even have to do anything.
well its good to see a black school putting out awesome research! maybe they'll get fairer funding now.
Besides Crysis and Porn, what good is a computer anyway?
How dare ye talk ill of my Core i7 system!
Now all we need are nanosharks to attach them to.
"The Singularity is coming sooner than you think."
These are for the heads of very small sharks?
"can operate at hundreds of terahertz"
That is unbelievably fast. Would make a big difference in comparison to the gigahertz we have atm.
r u cereal?
Oh. It never occured to me!
Considering that the average consumer machine generally tops out at just a few GHz, "unbelievably fast" is an understatement.
m' Kay
okay, make a pentium 4 at three terahertz and you still wouldn't want one.
Are you still working with a Pentium 4? I pre-ordered a THZ proc just a minute ago.
@neofolklore Since the Pentium 4 in this laptop can cook eggs at 3GHz, I wouldn't want anyone to try building a 3THz one anywhere on this planet - we don't want the atmosphere igniting or anything.
In another 50yrs (maybe) ;]]]]
is there any "optical computers" for sale?
The new Tron movie is going to ROCK! With a soundtrack by Daft Punk it cant go wrong :D
I don't understand a word of it.
Admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Problem?? Did I say I have a problem?
Relax, it was a joke.
What part of "alternative means of surface plasmons" do you not understand?
The only thing I understood was: Gundam.
The race for THz computers will be just a sideline. The real race will be for the first and subsequently better thinking machines.
This is GREAT news. I love seeing progress in the nanophotonics world. This doesn't just allow us to download youtube clips faster or get more porn or whatever it is you do on the net...this allows medical research, space exploration, and any other scientific application you could ever imagine speed up their endeavors. Cures to diseases can come about quicker. We might even see all diseases eradicated within our lifetime. And many other things we could never even imagine. The future is brighter because of this news.
If anyone is interested in just how these 'optical chips' work, feel free to ask. I could probably give a reasonably understandable explanation for your questions.
Out.
I am all ears if you wish to explain.
Didn't you know? They don't cure diseases anymore, they just get you hooked on drugs that take care of most of the effects. The last disease we cured was in the 60's, then the pharmaceutical companies got smart and greedy.
But can it run Crysis?
;)
It will save so much space Crysis will be imbeded on the processor
With terahertz processors, wouldn't maximum speed still be limited by the wires used to hook everything up? Processors aren't the only parts of a computer...
I'm pretty sure by the time we're using THz processors, our computers will be completely decked out with fiber optic cables. (Well, the next step up, anyway. They always find ways to outdo themselves.
Fiber Optics, Infiniband *fap fap fap fap tteeerraaheerrrttzzzzz!!!
ahhh.
even with fiber optic cables signals are still limited to the speed of light, that will be a major problem. I just calculated that in 1 cycle of a THz processor light only travels 0.3 mm so these processors will have to be really really small.
hmm, i guess having the smallest laser in the world might help with that.
the doors to Skynet have just been unlocked :O
Heat ?
Beam me up Scotty.
More speed? That would be nice, but smaller processors more power efficient processors excite me more.
I assume this discovery will allow for the latter, in the near future.
Now we can finally simulate two particles interacting with each other! OR a universe! Maybe we created ourselves in the future with one of these THz machines, that ran so fast it traveled back in time because the frequency of electromagnetic radiation emitted was perfectly tuned to resonate the space-time around the computer. Of course, since all of this needs to happen for our existence, we WILL have the 'optical' processor in the future. Shit; this is going to get big!
So will I still need to install DOSBox to play Duke Nukem in the distant future?
Next up Imaginary computers who's hertz's con only exist in your imagination. But seriously, wow.
Well, first off, you'd have to know a little something of how current-day transistor chips work, or silicon semiconductor or whatever you want to call them. CPU is fine.
Today's CPUs are nothing more than millions or billions of very small transistors packed in close formation on top of a silicon wafer. When electric current input gets to the CPU, usually user-supplied through peripherals (mouse, keyboard, etc), the transistors inside a CPU make decisions as to what to do based on software programming. Input>>>output. This happens now a days at 1 to 4 billion times per second, for the average PC. Keep in mind that the CPU is also tracking many other different processes simultaneously, so the CPU's full potential is seldom seen devoted to just you. It can keep track of the upkeep of hard drives, core voltages of the CPU itself, and many other things all to ensure normal operating parameters of the overall system. You'll see these extreme cooling setups involving actual mini air conditioners for PCs and even liquid Nitrogen and liquid Helium, bringing down the CPUs temperature to below zero, where as if normal fans were used, the CPU would literally melt itself from being "clocked" too high.
Well, now they're trying to push the bandwidth (processing speed) even further. BTW, industry terms such as bandwidth, data rate, etc can mean different things depending on what type of industry you apply them to. For instance, in telecommunications, bandwidth means the size of a channel. For instance, if I told you that the fiber optic line going to your ISP has an aggregate bandwidth of 1 GHz (Gigahertz - 1 billion cycles per second) that means the frequencies it is operating on could be something like 2GHz - 3GHz. That's equal to 1 GHz of totally channel availability. If I were to apply it to the PC or electronics industry, I would say something like, your processor is able to operate at 1 GHz total bandwidth.
So, about pushing the power even further...
As it is, the potential of the transistor is reaching its limits. They've done the whole "dual core" and "quad core" and "multi core" extravaganza, but it will never replace what potential the photonic processor could achieve if realized (it'll happen soon enough). The thing most people don't realize is that most connections going to and from your peripheral interfaces (mouse, keyboard, etc) and even to other devices like HDDs, CD-ROMs, are serial connections. It's a single data stream, whereas the parallel would be multiple data streams. The CPU always has a bottleneck, maybe always will. Even with multicore systems, they can't comprehend everything at once. You can only go so far with how much information you can stuff onto electrical signals. I'm talking ones and zeros, on and off states, yes and no, up and down cycles of a sine wave. It's all the same thing. More theory...
CPUs, computers, telecommunications, EVERYTHING is based off of time. Time, time, time, everything needs _time_ to operate on. It's the basis of electronics as well as our everyday lives. The faster and more acurate a device can measure time, the more information you can stuff into that space of time. Time is inversely proportional to frequency. Therefore, 1/time = frequency.
5GHz = 5 billion cycles per second. (5,000,000,000/s). Every second = 5 x 10^-9 cycles. It's a relationship.
Different materials naturally give off rhythmic pulses, such as quartz. Quartz is used in many watches to record the passing of time. We know that in a given span, it will emit so many pulses. And, coincidentally, the smaller the piece of quartz, the faster it will pulse. Many different timing standards exist today. We have Cesium beam standards, Rubidium standards, even Hydrogen MASER standards which don't last very long but are incredibly accurate. Sorry if this goes off into many tangents.
Computing is all about modulating ones and zeros onto an analog signal. How many times per second can you get that signal to cycle such that a receiving device can track it either rising and falling below a given value of voltage--that's the key. First, a computer chip needs timing to function. The many transistors in a CPU calculate decisions many times a second. The faster they can do it, the more data that gets computed, the more output you can achieve. To have a clock that can comprehend the passing of a nano or femto second is truly mind-boggling, but that's what we have today. The problem is with silicon-based transistors, is that they tend to heat up past the 5 GHz range because they are based on electricity flowing through them. And the transistors are needed to be packed very close together in order to not suffer from signal attenuation over distance (even though that distance is mere microns!). This is because they run on very low current, and that is because the more current, the more heat. There is a heat-spacing dilemna now. We are running out of processing power for such devices because they literally 'can't take the heat'. The industry ran into this very same situation back when computing was based on the Vacuum Tube. Just google it if you're interested.
Enter light.
To modulate time and data onto light is the next logical step. This is nothing new. Modulation of intelligence frequencies onto a light carrier wave was first discovered VERY long ago. I won't go into it, but just go here if you're interested: http://www.sff.net/people/Jeff.Hecht/history.html
(intelligence frequencies refers to the data modulated onto a carrier wave).
The frequency range of light used for long distance communications is VERY high (in the terahertz range). Go here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
That's your carrier wave, and it can also be used as a timing signal. Any given wave in the "light" range bobs up and down VERY fast. Thereforem, more data can be modulated onto each rise and fall of the signal in a given length of time.
Picture this. Rule #1: you get one second to process as much information as you can.
Rule #2: you have to "superimpose" this information onto each crest and trough of a wave (each top and bottom).
If a wave oscillates up and down faster than another wave in the same amount of time, you can fit more information on that wave.
Basically, what will happen: data will be recorded onto a light wave through modulation. Higher frequency equals more rises and falls per second in the sine wave. This equates to more opportunities for processing speed, provided every componenet in the system can "comprehend" or "measure" the frequency of the signal.
So, what this all boils down to is that very small LASERs will replace transistors, which only operate with electrical signals. Using light, heat is gone from the signal itself because there are no more wires to be concerned with. The circuit, in a sense, is now air. The only heat source to be concerned with is from the many LASER devices themselves. I imagine the user interface will still have to be optoelectrical, meaning any input we supply to the CPU will have to be converted from electrical impulse to a light beam in order for the photonic chip to understand.
But that's basically it in a nutshell. It's a lot to take in, but let me know if any part of that didn't make any sense to you.
thanks man, that was very interesting/informative
And let me dispell some myths here:
The optical processor WILL NOT "process information faster than the speed of light". Optical processors do not "speed anything up". They simply allow more amounts of data to be computed within a given amount of time. It will simply take advantage of light produced from LASERs (Light Amplification Stimulated from the Emission of Radiation) so that more data can be computed per second, because a wave of light has a very high frequency (trillions of cycles per second). There is no "going back in time" or "creating a univeres". If you're interested in that stuff, google "particle physics". Photonic computing is not that!
There will be no wires in a photonic processor, at least none that process data. Currently, in today's chips, wires or "tracers" embedded within the circuit board (usually copper) conduct the flow of data as electricity. With the new technology, light will be the messenger, not electricity.
/End myth-busting/
And with the insane, astronomical speed that these processors will possess, who needs other components in a system such as hard drives? Optical storage mediums will surge again. RAM can be a platter of CD-ROMs. Even high-volume storage too.
Instead of having a separate printer that takes up space, how about using LASERs of the computer itself to create images on paper? We do it now anyways. How about a LASER monitor? Yes, the do exist. Simply dedicate a portion of the photonic chip to video display, run a singlemode fiber optic cable carrying a DWDM signal to a monitor, and bam. You've got a video image without the need for a video card. The photonic processor can do trillions of calculations per second, why not?
With IBM moving to 28nm now, this seems totally unimpressive.
28nm is still a joke compared to the capabilities to photonic computing. And besides, if size is all you're concerned about, the article mentioned that 1 nm is attainable.
Erik,
Maybe so, but do you possess or have the ability to find and produce one shred of evidence to prove your claim about the drug companies? It seems like a nice theory, but I don't know what to believe in that matter. Problem with diseases and viruses: they can evolve. Sucks.
wait, wasn't the spaser a weapon in super metroid? oh, spazer. close enough. i'd better get my arm cannon pretty frickin' soon.