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Light-Based Memory Chip Is First To Permanently Store Data
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have developed the first ever memory chip that’s entirely light-based and can store data permanently. Sciencemag reports: "Today's electronic computer chips work at blazing speeds. But an alternate version that stores, manipulates, and moves data with photons of light instead of electrons would make today's chips look like proverbial horses and buggies. Now, one team of researchers reports that it has created the first permanent optical memory on a chip, a critical step in that direction. If a more advanced photonic memory can be integrated with photonic logic and interconnections, the resulting chips have the potential to run at 50 to 100 times the speed of today's computer processors."
No the real question is it made of crystals. Every future computer is made is crystals
While you're deliberately being a moron, the answer actually happens to be yes, though it kind of depends.
The article just says they successfully fabricated a optical storage cell (3 bits per cell) using standard chipmaking process that's based off a phase change material, like the stuff used for rewritable DVDs, as the storage mechanism. The PCM material is partially crystalline and partially amorphous (non-crystalline) depending on how much energy is dumped into when it's being written to; that is how they get the 8 separate levels that allows it to store 3 bits per cell. So, how crystalline it is depends on what you have in memory at the time.
No. And this matters - when your dealing with 3GHz+ clocks, it actually becomes a problem getting a signal from one side of the chip to the other and back again within a single clock cycle.