Well, Intel announced the first terahertz transistor over two decades ago, but there's still no terahertz processor. I wouldn't hold my breath for a petahertz one anytime soon.
k__•8mo ago
Maybe the new ARM architectures will deliver.
petra•8mo ago
The speed limits are because of the latency of the wires and the issue of heat
onion2k•8mo ago
I wouldn't hold my breath for a petahertz one anytime soon.
That depends on what you mean by 'processor'. Optical systems are great at linear processing, but terrible at nonlinearity. You wouldn't want an optical processor based CPU to run Doom. Encoding something like an AI model or a codec into an optical processor would be great though.
rcostin2k2•8mo ago
k__•8mo ago
petra•8mo ago
onion2k•8mo ago
That depends on what you mean by 'processor'. Optical systems are great at linear processing, but terrible at nonlinearity. You wouldn't want an optical processor based CPU to run Doom. Encoding something like an AI model or a codec into an optical processor would be great though.
One Google search later.. Turns out a team have made a photonic tensor processor. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03070-1 So you could have an even fast one of those.