Paint-on Laser Brings Optical Computing Closer 132
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist has a story about a laser made by painting a solution of semiconductor crystals onto glass. It could be used to break the interconnect barrier by having optical interconnects, the interconnect barrier threatens Moore's law unless a faster way of connecting chips is found."
Was paint by numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
Optical interconnects could make for far more reliable connections between system components. Ribbon cables etc break easily, and are a real nightmare for assembly. OTOH, a few specks of dust in an optical connection could cause a lot of grief (reflection etc) making one wonder what the longterm prospects of shipping optically connected products are.
Re:Good News (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't the Russians try this at one point? If I remember right, they had trouble distinguishing between the on state, and the not on/not off state, and wound up abandoning the idea because it was too unreliable.
Bottleneck Slide (Score:3, Interesting)
Parallel dataflow and distributed control are long overdue to the mainstream. Compilable UML is a slow, crude path to it. When I can draw a flowchart of primitive objects, any of which are packaged procedures or other flowed objects, and watch it run, I'll have a much better shot at exploiting all the compute/storage/transmit capacity available at that time. When "compilers" can distribute my data among the resources according to topology and analytical prediction, I'll finally get full use of the machines I'm using. Until then, I'm doubling my HW capacity every year or two so it can use half the efficiency gain running inefficient software.
It starts to at high frequencies (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a problem yet, that I know of, but something that we have to think about in the future.