[Special thanks to Mehrdad, who provided me the technical materials.]
It seems that we are still so fur from a general purpose quantum computer. So we’ll have to ask the Moore’s Law for a reprieve! Silicon photonics is the next technology that will give us a break before 2016.
Scientists from Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) have achieved a major advance using silicon manufacturing processes to create a novel “transistor-like” device that can encode data onto a light beam. As reported in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature, Intel researchers split a beam of light into two separate beams as it passed through silicon, then used a novel transistor-like device to hit one beam with an electric charge, inducing a phase shift. When the two beams of light are recombined, the phaseshift induced between the two arms makes the light exiting the chip go on and off at >1 GHz, 50× faster than previously produced on silicon. This on and off pattern of light can be translated into the 1s and 0s needed to transmit data.
Using this technology, NEC, the Japanese supercomputer maker, announced that it had made an advance in optical connections between chips that will pave the way for a supercomputer able to reach speeds up to 10 petaflops, or 10 million trillion instructions a second. That is about 20 times faster than the world’s fastest computer.
Also recently, Sun Microsystems has been granted a $44 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract from the US Department of Defense on a project of building a supercomputer using this technology, that could break Moore’s Law.
According to Sun, if it is successful with its interconnect design, new computers will have the potential to be more than one thousand times faster than its current generation. The end result could be a new virtual supercomputer that is more efficient, faster and cheaper than anything available on the market now.
