IBM Discovery May Lead To Exascale Supercomputers 135
alphadogg writes "IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in using pulses of light to accelerate data transfer between chips, something they say could boost the performance of supercomputers by more than a thousand times. The new technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, integrates electrical and optical modules on a single piece of silicon, allowing electrical signals created at the transistor level to be converted into pulses of light that allow chips to communicate at faster speeds, said Will Green, silicon photonics research scientist at IBM. The technology could lead to massive advances in the power of supercomputers, according to IBM."
Re:Who would've thought... (Score:4, Interesting)
...that the metal connections between individual components would not be fast enough.
If you bothered to RTFA (emphasis mine):
Multiple photonics modules could be integrated onto a single substrate or on a motherboard, Green said.
I.e. they're not talking about hooking up individual gates or even basic logic units with optical communications. Anyone who's actually dealt with chip design in the past several decades realizes that off-chip communications is a sucky, slow, power-hungry, and die-space-hungry affair. Most of the die area and a huge amount (30%-50% or more) of power consumption of modern CPU's is gobbled up by the pad drivers -- i.e. off-chip communications. Even "long distance" on-chip communications runs into a lot of engineering challenges, which impacts larger die-area chips and multi-chip modules.