Yes, basic physics shows [1] that we can use (free space) optics instead of wires inside chips. This will improve energy use and speeds by 3 orders of magnitude. Next to a transistor you put a photon detector. You can flip the transistor with the voltage from the photon detector by sending 10000 photons (or less). Pictures of such systems in the slides [2].
We can beam billions of optical channels with different frequencies in parallel across chips, exabits (yettabits, yottabits) per second.
We will not compute with photons tough [4][5], the optical structures are to large and it would only work for very specific types of computations.
We design wafer scale integrations (very large chips) this way we can start making these fast on-chip interconnects around 2027 if we invest a few billion today in making free space optics. A layman's introduction in my talk here [3].
How much parallelization is required? Any idea how fast a single channel could get with optical transport and photon-detecting transistors?
As an Elixir dev (where parallelization is relatively easy), I think there is a lot of potential for parallelization that isn't being used by most programs, but for serial algorithms where multi-core can't be used, I wonder what the ceiling will be.
> Any idea how fast a single channel could get with optical transport and photon-detecting transistors?
Terabits per second per channel would be possible but it would require to much high energy SerDes (serializer-deserialiser) circuits. It will be more energy efficient to have more parallel optical channels (bundled) switching at the low power optimal speed of the transistors, around 1-2 Ghz instead.
>I wonder what the parallelisation ceiling will be? How much parallelization is required?
There is no ceiling, no limit, for example look at an "existence proof": there are around a hundred trillion cells in your body that perform billions of computations chemically and also with DNA processing by ribosomes in parallel. No limit. Those 8 billion bodies theoretically could learn to work together with the aid of internet and personal computers. There are 10^24 stars in the universe.
Your thinking, your imagination, your thinking brain modelling of parallel systems is the ceiling, the limit. But you can learn, experiment and improve over time so your limits on thinking up better ways to parallelise computation will improve. Humanity could dedicate itself to the open ended creation of knowledge (of knowing how to compute in parallel with photons without limits) [1].
Right now our computation limits are limited by our knowledge (of manufacturing at atom scales), the energy output of the sun and the amount of atoms in the solar system we could rearrange [4].
We should fund our scientists to create the knowledge we need to enlarge the limits [5]. I hope you'll fund me as well :-)
> Elixir development
Smalltalk, LISP, Erlang, Elixer, Actor Language are some of the best message passing programming languages for massively scaling parallelism.
Alan Kay [2][3] has great lectures to get you started in thinking better (including about (computational) parallelism, scaling and message passing). A few others have written some papers as well (see links in my HN comments the last 12 weeks). I can teach you a bit too, write to morphle73 at gmail dot com.
We can beam billions of optical channels with different frequencies in parallel across chips, exabits (yettabits, yottabits) per second.
We will not compute with photons tough [4][5], the optical structures are to large and it would only work for very specific types of computations.
We design wafer scale integrations (very large chips) this way we can start making these fast on-chip interconnects around 2027 if we invest a few billion today in making free space optics. A layman's introduction in my talk here [3].
[1] Stanford Seminar - Saving energy and increasing density in information processing using photonics - David B. Miller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hWWyuesmhs
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Miller-65/publica...
[3] Smalltalk and Self Hardware https://vimeo.com/731037615
[4] D. A. B. Miller, “Are optical transistors the logical next step?” Nature Photonics, vol. 4, pp. 3–5, 2010. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Miller-65/publica...
[5] Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communications – a Tutorial Review https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05510.pdf