Reuters article

Ok, goodbye transistors... hello SR's optical chips?

No, SR optical systems as fluff-described are physically impossible. What's missing is plastic processors.

The crossbar latch is just smaller solid-state tech. I'm still waiting for the liquid-state processors that IBM were trumpting about in 1988; been more 5 years now, hasn't it Gordon.

this one still works on electrons. so its far from optical...
may be that the SR chips is physical impossible but there are work on actual opticaly based chips and storage units (flash ram like useing lasers in a 2d or 3d enviroment. not the cds and dvds of today).

the SR cpu allso pulls a diffrent trick, it seems to not use binary as its basicly signal system...

but mostly its fully optical (outside of the powersource) to get around stuff like emp and heat. how else do you cram a cray into something the size of a keyboard?

What's an optical drive, then?

Cheers, never really got that

we have a deletable cds and dvds (rw enabled) only that they need a area that is read only (atleast the cd-rw's do) to calibrate the laser. therefor you can only rewrite those media about 1000 times before the content becomes locked. allso, you cant just delete something in the middle of the cd and forget about it as the data will be there unless you zero the entire media, its only the table of content (toc) that gets alterd so that its seems the files are gone. and with the right cd driver or software you can read the older tocs to get access to these files (nero adds this ability to windows when installed).

closest we are today to a fully ram like media that is opticaly read is megneto-optical media. most know of those is the minidisc that sony make. basicly the writeing is dont with a laser heating a area up and then a magnet makes a grove in that area just like on a cd. but as its not a laser that does the actual writeing the number of rewrites are in the area of millions. and you can actualy rewrite a section of the disc, not just the toc. this means that the writeprossess isnt sensitive to movement the way a cd or dvd is (alltho the readprosess still is). problem is that to date the write prosess is painfully slow compared to cd and dvd burning, and even more so compared to hdd and flash.

Except that, as you say, it takes a magnet to write, which means you can't use it in a full-optic datapath. Also, anything which requires that sort of physical change is never going to scale fast enough to be used as RAM.

I see the best hope as being nanomachines which can very rapidly flip back and forth between reflective and not, but then I'm a computer scientist, not an engineer, so my knowledge is limited.

when useing optics you dont so much need it to be reflective if your talking ram like as then you most likely going to pass the light tru the object rather then reflect it of. then you can make a system that alters the light somehow on passing, like say the freqenzy or basicly color. done right you can save all manner of bit states in a very tiny area as you connect bit state to freqenzy. only problem is that i dont know about a material being able to do that and then being alterd if light shines in at a diffrent angle, like say taking on the propertys of the light shineing on it.

but if that can be pulled of then you dont need so much reflective propertys as you dont copy the transistor useing light but rather shine a light down a row of filters and based on their states you get a result at the end.