Could using fiber optics internally for personal PCs ever be practical or even feasible?
Fiber Optics
Aiden Hernandez
Cameron Rodriguez
>personal PCs
You mean personal PC computers.
Nolan Adams
Electric fields move faster in copper than light in fiber optics.
Dominic Ramirez
lold. nice
Isaiah Baker
>lets waste this electricity to generate light to move data 0.0000000000001 metres across a CPU
are you fucking retarded?
Isaiah Russell
what about when they develop circuits that work with light instead of electricity
Sebastian Long
I actually designed a couple of logic components based on light intensity, they can be of an arbitrary base i.e. not binary but they would require a stupid sensitive method to measure light intensity, I'm not sure if the photoelectric effect would be enough.
Andrew Young
intel made something similar few years ago, but was never released. it could achieve speeds of up to 50Gbps
Wyatt Morris
Damn. The worst part is that I was trying to avoid that mistake.
Really? That's interesting. However, isn't the benefit of fiber optics the bandwidth?
I was more thinking in terms of throughput. So data transfer on the bus is not a limiting factor in a computer?
A follow up question. Do you know of any optical storage technologies? What prevents optical technologies from replacing tech that is known for being slow (e.g. harddrive)?
I see. That's very interesting. So, from what you are saying, it sounds like one huge hurdle is sensitivity and reliability.
I personally find it interesting that we have all of this LED and photovoltaic tech, but I have never heard of these technologies as having the potential to, even experimentally, replace traditional computer hardware.
So, I was just curious if there were some EE, CSE, or Physics specialists that had some insights into the limitations of using optical tech to replace traditional PC parts.
Ryan Jackson
fiber optic cable is expensive to make
Charles Collins
telecom user here, commercial fibers can do 400Gbps max speed
in labs research groups have gotten Pb traffic
Luis Perez
Da-damn. The future sounds fast.
Ryan Gomez
> en.wikipedia.org
Probably similar in principle to what you're thinking of.
Andrew Cook
Anthony Nguyen
That's called an optical interconnect. The problem is generating and sensing the light in a small form factor.
en.wikipedia.org
As we make transistors smaller, we need to pack wires going into the chip into a smaller space, this increases parasitic capacitance and signal delay.
Optics don't have this problem
light is big. about 40 transistors could fit in the wavelength of red light.
So are computer chips
Evan Wright
Less power use and significantly lower error rate than silicon and copper which allows for M-Ary data transfer. Surely the question is when.
Austin Russell
Optics are good (if not the best) for long distance transfer of information but I don't see the purpose of it in really close distances (such as PC architecture). You'd need amplifiers/converters at each entering/exiting node plus glass cables need to be really clean in order to function properly so cleaning your PC could be only done by professionals and let's not even mention the problem with dust that accumulates in PCs.
It's just not practical at the moment. Maybe some kind of revolution in technology will change that.
Camden Russell
Mix some sodium chloride and put it into a thin hose. Put the hose in the freezer. Activate absolute-zero mode. Take the hose and run a current through it. Goals.
Check mate, physicists.
Wyatt Cooper
>light is big. about 40 transistors could fit in the wavelength of red light.
yet a single wave could carry more information than 40 transistors in one clock-cycle.
because there are a lot more hues to red than there are 1's and 0's in 40 transistors.
optical circuits WILL be the future of computation.
Robert Robinson
But you obtain a slower clock speed because the light has to travel larger distances between photonic elements.
Optical communication between chips makes sense, optical computing as the chips does not.
Michael Russell
all this tech just for faster porn
Lincoln Williams
>because there are a lot more hues to red than there are 1's and 0's in 40 transistors.
Are you retarded?
2^40 >> "hues of red" whatever that's supposed to mean
Even if we had sensitivity to a difference of 10^-6 nanometre in wavelength and used the entire visual spectrum 2^40 >> 400*10^6.
Surely you realise that there are engineering and possibly quantum mechanical limits to the continuous spectrum of light.