OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/20567/Optical_Chips_Said_to_Run_Cooler_Pack_More_Bits Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:59:07 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Doesn't this break the laws of physics? http://osnews.com/thread?337996 http://osnews.com/thread?337996 I'm not a physicist, but when looking over this article, some of the physics seemed off to me... that plus seeing one or two of the classic signs of charlatanism make me wonder.

Sorry for the pessimism. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Almafeta) Comments RE: Doesn't this break the laws of physics? http://osnews.com/thread?337997 http://osnews.com/thread?337997 Optical chips? Pah! Everybody knows the future lies with Atom Chips! http://www.osnews.com/story/13216/What_About_Atom_Chip_ Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc) Comments The HAL 9000 http://osnews.com/thread?338021 http://osnews.com/thread?338021 Good Morning, Dave Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (toyeys01) Comments I love how... http://osnews.com/thread?338028 http://osnews.com/thread?338028 They had "crystals" in SciFi flicks and books forever as data storage and the like. Slowly becoming true... (even if this is just crap, there have been other researchers and talks about crystals and storage) Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (helf) Comments RE: Doesn't this break the laws of physics? http://osnews.com/thread?338030 http://osnews.com/thread?338030
I'm not a physicist, but when looking over this article, some of the physics seemed off to me... that plus seeing one or two of the classic signs of charlatanism make me wonder.

Sorry for the pessimism.


Correct. You're not a physicist. Your skepticism could have been and most certainly has been the same skepticism since we discovered electronconductivity across the entire Periodic Table, let alone across the varying types of crystalline lattice structures that Material Science Engineering and Physical Chemistry continue to develop/understand that sits dormant in plain sight. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tyrione) Comments Dynamic Memory http://osnews.com/thread?338038 http://osnews.com/thread?338038 This is very nice, I'm sure for certain high-end, memory intensive supercomputing applications, but here on my desktop, the thing what's making all the heat is the CPU, not the RAM.

Whenever I read this stuff, I find it hard to get interested, knowing that I'm never really going to understand it and probably won't see anything come of it for the best part of a decade, if ever. It all sounds great, I just don't know what to do with this information. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Michael) Comments RE: Dynamic Memory http://osnews.com/thread?338108 http://osnews.com/thread?338108 What can be made into memory can be made into logic gates as well. Think about it a moment - a memory cell is a logic gate with but two functions: x = constant; and return x. Making logic elements will take more structures, but isn't any harder to make than memory. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JLF65) Comments RE[2]: Doesn't this break the laws of physics? http://osnews.com/thread?338141 http://osnews.com/thread?338141 Well I am a physicist, an optical physicist in fact and I can tell you that all this talk of optical computers is pretty much rubbish. The effect these guys discovered is quite nice, and might even be useful, however, we are not going to use it in optical computers. There might be a need for doing some logic all optical, but optical computers are a step back not forward, both in terms of power consumption and size. In order to do all-optical logic, you need powers in at least the milliwatt range, compared to nano or subnano Watts for electronic logic. Secondly, the size, waveguides for light are a few micrometres in diameter, have fun building a chip from that.

Generally, all this talk about optical computers is sensationalism.

Cheers
Jochen Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cycoj) Comments