Sun Turns to Lasers to Speed Up Computer Chips

alphadogg writes to mention that Sun is attempting to move from the typical design of multiple small chips back to a unified single-wafer design. "The company is announcing today a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams. The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today's supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors."

Great idea!

[peipas]

I assume these systems will be water-cooled so the miniaturized sharks have somewhere to swim.

-1 : redundant

[UdoKeir]

To quote Scott McNealy:

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have SPARCS with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!

New warning stickers...

[fahrbot-bot]

From TFA: Each chip would be able to communicate directly with every other chip via a beam of laser that could carry billions of bits of data a second.

Do not look at chip with remaining good eye.

Re:Commentary on this?

[ergo98]

To get you started, here's a search for you [google.ca]. It looks like IBM is only promising a 100-fold performance increase, but Sun got the contract (despite the possibly inaccurate story, it doesn't sound like they actually figured out anything thus far, besides "how to get some government loot") by promising a 1000x increase.

Hey DARPA — I'll give you a 1,000,000x improvement! Email and I'll tell you where to send the cash.

Re:Great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you feel about Sea Bass?

RE: Sun Turns to Lasers to Speed Up Computer Chips

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read TFA, but I did read the headline...
So you are telling me that Star at the center of our solar system (Sol or some people call it "Sun") is somehow changing its rate of rotation/turning to track lasers and the side effect of this turning is to increase the production speed of inedible chips made out of computers?
No wonder, I don't read TFA... the headline is just plain silly.

Re:Great idea!

[utopianfiat]

Depends, are they ill-tempered?

Re:Don't Shake the computer!

[Belial6]

Don't worry, someone will ask it a question that is a paradox before then, and the whole thing will destroy itself with sparks and slowed audio.