i put this here 'cause i think it's newsworthy
 
WE WILL HAVE ANOTHER TYPE OF PROCESSORS
 
not like currents which function with electricity
but with LIGHT because Engineers are almost at the limit of graver process
(0.13 will attained the limit)
& under we lose the isolating layer between transistors
 
so they are thinking to replace electronics transistors by something which function with light (or lazer or .. i've to read another time the article to remember)
so transistors out, silicon out, LONG LIFE TO THE LIGHT
 
 
note:
IT'S NOTE A JOKE, REALLY
 
just perhaps about the year...    
 
 
i know, a lot of you will certainly think this guy is out
but make an effort to try to think of, to search more about..
 
 
Everyone, Opinions, Infos, Info or Intox ?
 
 
EasyInfo    
I would like to Invest for my PC !!
ok, buy nothing.

Yes, you are right on about the transmission of photons instead of electrons and the medium changing from actual metals to ??? I think that is one of the hurdles, what physical medium to use to thansmit these light signals !
 
Also, have read that the immediate next level of proc will be of the matrix type(no not the movie). You know, multilayered circuitry. If i am not mistaken, and i am far from iffalible, this could theoretically bost up performance by 10 or 20+. Obsticle here is dissapation of the damn HEAT.  
 
Danny
 
Electric coolaid for everyone, except me, never touch the stuff !

Interesting... I wanne have a 'warp' CPU, sounds cool.
 
My case has so many fans that it hovers above the ground   .

Be carefull not to get a "warped" cpu there svol.  :-)
 
Danny
 
Duby the snake now has a brand new skin

Do you have a link for this?  I've been preaching fiber-optic motherboards for years now.  Currently, the problem is I/O...it not's a problem to transmit the light on busses using fiber optics, but they can't transform the photons back to electronics FAST enough (opto-isolators do this).
 
So I figure either:
1.  They will develop a new transistor altogether as you mentioned, so that they won't have to make this transformation.  
2.  Or they will find a way to make the transformation fast enough at chip-level I/O.
 
Note, in order to do this (number 1) though, they are going to have to find a way to store the bits using light also!  I don't know how in the hell they are going to do this...I'd say we are much more than a year from this so don't get your hopes up.  If I had to guess, I'd say 3-4 years...
 
Catheter and Caffeine IV are in place.  Let's PLAY.

why "warp" ?    
 
 
EasyInfo    
I would like to Invest for my PC !!
ok, buy nothing.

the medium will be some kind of a crystal, and it can have hundreds of layers of photonic transistors working at light speeds, so future optical processors would be probably complete systems, with processor core, RAM, ROM and I/O integrated into a single crystal of about a cubic centimeter!
 
girish
 
<font color=red>Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

If you don't mind, could you enlighten us on how opto-isolators work?
 
Also, how does the size of fiber-optic channels compare to the current .13 micron technology?

why would one want to convert the signals back to electrical ones? transmision would be through fobre optic cable, processing in the crystals, for I/O they will have optical components, you already have optical mice, all you need is to generate the signals in form of light and thats not too difficult. optical keyboards would be easily designed this way, and the display.., well the LCD display is a optical technology itself! It does need electric field to charge the pixels, but then simple optical->electric convertors will work fine as tranceivers do.
 
girish
 
<font color=red>Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

Because the speed of light, if I'm correct: warp 1=lightspeed=330000km/s.
 
My case has so many fans that it hovers above the ground   .

Apple is gonan be using .10 micron on G5....
 
What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

Well with that kind of number crunching power perhaps the human race will have a shot at resolving these seemingly insurpassable issues we presently are facing.
That is my hope.
 
Danny, 5th coffee finished, no more please.
 
Duby the snake now has a brand new skin

Actually, I was wrong here.  It's been a while since I worked with them, but basically it's a type of transistor that uses a light emitting diode for the transmitter (LED) and a phototdiode or photoresistor for the receiver.  My mistake was making it sound like this is used to convert Light to electrical current, but it doesn't.  It basically converts electrical->light->electrical, so it wouldn't work for the I/O problem.
 
Sorry about that.
 
Catheter and Caffeine IV are in place.  Let's PLAY.

Optical components like mice and keyboards still use electric current internally, not light.  The problem is that nobody has made a complete IC component that works soley with light including transmission and storage.  So we're forced to convert the signal from light back to electricity.  Imagine we have the bus to the Processor conducting information by photons.  The processor itself still uses electric current.  So the problem is transforming this data BACK to electricity, which we have done (photodiodes) but they are not fast enough.
 
Catheter and Caffeine IV are in place.  Let's PLAY.

Here's a link if you want a better explanation of opto-isolators:
 
<A HREF="http://homepages.which.net/~paul.hills/SpeedControl/Optos.html" target="_new">http://homepages.which.net/~paul.hills/SpeedControl/Optos.html</A>
 
Catheter and Caffeine IV are in place.  Let's PLAY.

ok, good
 
i didn't understand the english word "warp"
 
 
EasyInfo    
I would like to Invest for my PC !!
ok, buy nothing.

Ok, about solving stuff that's really complex. Pike, have u studied computer theory or anything? If you haven't, basically the way to find how long a program will run, one uses Big O as it's called. This is a rough way of estimating worst case scenario. Now, many programs, such as factoring inscrease exponentially (that means 2^n)when another input is added. Others, increase by n^2, n^3, etc. For instance, a simple sorting algorithm that starts from the end of an array of numbers, and checks 2 at a time, is O n^2. therefore, regardless of how fast a computer, digital computers will never be able to complete certain tasks. In that case, other means of finding the solution, or better algorithms must be found, but that is not always possible. hence, even if the comp was 20x faster, it still wouldn't necessarily help with the really big problems, such as nuclear bomb simulation, number factoring (which by the way current security systems are based on), etc.
 
What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

Ok, my bad for the long explanation, but after you have been reading this stuff for a few days staright with minimal sleep, u begin to think in everything in algorithms......even how u should wake up or the prices at the supermarket
 
What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

Ok, i'm willing to show hand of cards any day, unlike some people, and not talking about you. I have college junior programmer diploma, i don't know what that amounts to in US, most probably not much. And that is from waaaaaaaaay back, i mean 8088 days, gulp! Do not work in this field as my bio attests to. My REAL schooling is "water treatment technician". I won't go on about psychologie, philosophy or religion because thouse as mirky waters indeed.
My point to finish is this:
Would we have gone to the moon without powerfull computing devices ?
Would the shuttle crafts function as well as they do without powerfull computers ?
And finally just to make sure my previous post was explained properly by myself, this is what i(and from the book "contact" ) was trying to say: the value 'pi' has (i forget the math term, well it,s a real number : no end to the fractionnal part of the number, 3.1416xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx etc come on help me out a tad, you know what i mean) infinit fractionnal numbers. Can be calculated by only one mathamatical process. And it is endless.
My point is at a given time or after a given number of calculations 10 to the 10000000000 etc power, there will no longer be aleatory numbers as results, but binary numbers and only binary numbers and these nubers taken  as a string of data can be decoded into : that's the punch line.
 
Hope my explanation is adequate and just for the books, this is not MY idea. It is as i said "CARL SAGAN's".
 
Danny
 
Duby the snake now has a brand new skin

Lol. Carl Sagan's. Well, anyway, if you think about it, computers are ironical- they have driven humanity forward, and are also keeping it from advancing. They are powerful enough to do many calculations, yet they can't do all of them in reasonable time. Can't wait for the HTMT and Quantum Computing (