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."

Comments

Are actuators faster than direct connections?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I wonder if the time saved transmitting information via light is offset by the transition time used to translate that back into electric signals. On a single board, the distance travelled is on the order of decimeters. On a chip, micrometers. Are the time savings *that* significant? Even between peripherals, the time saved seems negligble.