Technology is speeding up at such a rapid rate it’s truly phenomenal. Antiquated dialup Internet has quickly progressed into High Speed, and the computers themselves have gone from a 10 minute start up, to starting up in just a few seconds. Phones now possess the power not just to receive calls, but to browse the net, stream movies, and much more. Today, the technology of tomorrow is being thought of, developed, and tested. Concepts that may seem outlandish and impossible are already in the works – concepts such as smart homes, Power Felt fabric, and laser powered chip for your computer.
On the table for discussion today is the laser chip, and not just any laser chip mind you, a computer chip from HP that will have 256 microprocessors connected with beams of light! All of these little processors working together will make this laser powered chip capable of handling 10 trillion point operations per second meaning just five combined chips will equate to the speed of current supercomputers (so really, really fast).
To throw some more impressive numbers at you how’s this: each chip could communicate with the other at 20 terabytes/second as well as communicate with the memory at 10 terabytes/second. Not only would these laser powered computer chips use a significantly less amount of power, but they will also run between 2-6 times faster than a similar chip powered with current wires.
This laser powered chip is codenamed Corona and HP hopes to have it in everyday PC’s by 2017. So why so long until this new chip is available? Well, the technology to make the chip doesn’t exist yet but thankfully for HP that’s not going to be a hurdle for much longer. Researchers are continuing to work on shrinking optical communication devices and concentrating them so Corona is definitely a very real possibility.
So what else prevents us from having these super-fast laser powered chips in our PC’s right now? Well, as stated earlier the technology to build such a concentrated device is still in the works, but another issue is that these little chips have processors on them and the more of these processors there are on each chip, the harder it is to make them all work in unison. Additionally the sheer speed of the data accessing makes it such a massive power drain on computers.
Now, we mentioned that the technology is still being worked on, but we didn’t really touch base on what exactly is needed to create laser powered chips such as Codenamed Corona. In order for this technology to be produced there need to be some way for these chips to generate the laser on the chip itself. You know about laser printers and DVD players so you may already be familiar with semiconductor lasers – they’ve been around for a while. Unfortunately they need to be microsized in order to fit on this computer chip. Numerous solutions to this problem are being researched as we speak, and it won’t be long before one emerges and the chip codenamed Corona is available on every personal HP computer.
Image Source: MIT News
