New Optical Chip Claims 8 Trillion Operations/sec.

Richard Finney writes "Lenslet is announcing the 'World's First Commercial Optical Processor.'. Reuters has the story here. The Inquirer has a cool graphic here on it. The processor is specified to run at a speed of 8 Tera (8,000 Giga) operations per second, one thousand times faster than any known DSP. When Lenslet releases its Enlight processor in a matter of weeks, a unit using the technology will be 1.7 centimetres high and measure 15 by 15 centimetres."

Comments

Re:This is the Future

[John Hansen]

Optical processors have incredible potential. And if you think that's good, just wait. The combo of an optical processor with optical memory is a one-two punch.

But if you want to get the full speed out of your processor and memory, as I recall, all the buses must be optical as well.

Otherwise you're limited by silicon and PCB boards again...

Gotta Love the spin

[nsingapu]

"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports"
Its really quite sick and disturbing that the aftermath of 9/11 has degraded to a marketing ploy.

Re:what a ripoff!

[Directrix1]

I was almost impressed by this, until I read up on the technology on their website. It will have a pretty limited use as it only has 8-bit precision vector/matrix MAC which is where the 8 teraflops come from. This will be fine and all for just video but it isn't much of a quantum leap for anything else (besides having an optical core). I mean it has power, but there are other chips out there that do more with greater precision numbers.