News Goodbye Transistor? New Optical Switches Offer up to 1,000x Better Performance

[Admin]

Researchers with IBM and Moscow's Skolkovo Institute have developed "optical accelerators" - optical switches that use light instead of electricity to convey state changes and transmit information. The inventors claim an up to 1,000x speedup compared to traditional transistor-based switches - and there are applications for both classical and quantum computing.

Goodbye Transistor? New Optical Switches Offer up to 1,000x Better Performance : Read more

 

[jkflipflop98]

Yeah yeah yeah we hear this every few years "optical transistors coming soon!". Show me an actual working part running optically and we'll talk.

 

[kyzarvs]

Yeah yeah yeah we hear this every few years "optical transistors coming soon!". Show me an actual working part running optically and we'll talk.

From the last paragraph of the article, maybe you didn't get that far:
"It took 40 years for the first electronic transistor to enter a personal computer and the investment of many governments and companies and thousands of researchers and engineers," he says.
"It is often misunderstood how long before a discovery in fundamental physics research takes to enter the market."

 

[TerryLaze]

"It took 40 years for the first electronic transistor to enter a personal computer and the investment of many governments and companies and thousands of researchers and engineers," he says.

Yeah because the first transistor was made in 1907 and computers weren't even a dream yet back then.
Computers became very important around 1940-45... 40 years later...because of the war and yes all the governments suddenly needed computers and pumped money into them like crazy because it was the only way to keep up.

Today the only reason we don't get any computers with optical switches is because either they aren't ready yet for the same amount of performance and abuse ( how long before failure) or either they are way too expensive for anybody to consider them.

 

[jkflipflop98]

Transistors weren't invented until 1947 bruh. Computers ran on vacuum tubes until the 70's. The only functional "computers" during WWII were all of the mechanical nature - such as the Enigma Machine.

 

[hotaru.hino]

From the last paragraph of the article, maybe you didn't get that far:
"It took 40 years for the first electronic transistor to enter a personal computer and the investment of many governments and companies and thousands of researchers and engineers," he says.
"It is often misunderstood how long before a discovery in fundamental physics research takes to enter the market."

I mean there is a point though. Until there's an actual working product (show me an optical transistor computer that's running Linux or BSD), what's the point in saying "goodbye!" to currently existing technology?

 

[TerryLaze]

Transistors weren't invented until 1947 bruh. Computers ran on vacuum tubes until the 70's. The only functional "computers" during WWII were all of the mechanical nature - such as the Enigma Machine.

Sure bruh...
https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html

As in many other first along the road of technological progress, the stimulus which initiated and sustained the effort that produced the ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer)--the world's first electronic digital computer--was provided by the extraordinary demand of war to find the solution to a task of surpassing importance. To understand this achievement, which literally ushered in an entirely new era in this century of startling scientific accomplishments, it is necessary to go back to 1939.

By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power.