IBM has demonstrated a chip that can take advantage of photonics' higher bandwidth and lower energy consumption:
Engineers have long known that fibre-optic links are more desirable than copper wires for shuttling data around—the available bandwidth is higher, the distances that signals can be squirted over are longer, and energy consumption is lower. On the other hand, when it comes to actually doing stuff with that data, electronics are where it's at. This dichotomy has resulted in a very pronounced split between optical and electrical technologies: optics are used for networking between computers, but inside the chassis it's electronics all the way.
This approach has worked well so far, but as bandwidth and energy requirements continue to soar, research labs around the world have been looking at ways of bringing the optics ever closer to the electronics. The first step is to bring optical channels onto the motherboard, then onto the chip package, and ultimately onto the die so that electrical and optical pathways run side-by-side at a nanometer scale.
Quantum computing has also made a lot of gains recently. Perhaps in 5 years we'll be looking at a higher order of magnitude in processing power. What would you do with it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:40PM
The "higher order of magnitude" of quantum computing (or quantum coprocessing) will depend on the problem. The speedup could be a billion quintillion or nothing.
Something like Grover's algorithm could speed up database operations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm [wikipedia.org]
http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0301079v1.pdf [arxiv.org]
Replacing electronic components with optical ones could increase bandwidth and lower power consumption, but there is a more radical approach to optical computing:
http://optalysys.com/ [optalysys.com]
http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/08/06/exascale-breakthrough-weve-waiting/ [hpcwire.com]
http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/25/a-light-approach-to-genomics-with-optical-processors/ [theplatform.net]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]