[/img]The path to exascale computing is a long and windy one, and it's
dangerously close to slipping into our shunned bucket of "awesome
things that'll never happen." But we'll hand it to IBM -- those guys
and gals are working to create a smarter planet, and against our
better judgment, we actually think they're onto something here.
Scientists at the outfit recently revealed "a new chip technology that
integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of
silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light
(instead of electrical signals), resulting in smaller, faster and more
power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional
technologies." The new tech is labeled CMOS Integrated Silicon
Nanophotonics, and if executed properly, it could lead to exaflop-
level computing, or computers that could handle one million trillion
calculations per second. In other words, your average exascale
computer would operate around one thousand times faster than the
fastest machine today, and would almost certainly give Garry Kasparov
all he could stand. When asked to comment on the advancement, Dr.
Yurii A. Vlasov, Manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at
IBM Research, nodded and uttered the following quip: "I'm am IBMer,
and exascale tomfoolery is what I'm working on."*
*Not really, but you believed it, didn't you?
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