IBM breakthrough to speed up supercomputer chips
IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip. IBM also said that future tiny supercomputers on a chip could expend as little energy as a light bulb, compared with today’s supercomputers, which can use as much energy as powering hundreds of homes.
Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores by using a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator can be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires, IBM says. The new modulator IBM has developed is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previously demonstrated comparable modulators, IBM said on Thursday, paving the way for significant reductions in cost, energy and heat while increasing bandwidth.
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