Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by WithinReason 1709 days ago
This makes me wonder if transmitting data optically would help with the gradual lowering of the data/compute ratio over time:

https://sites.utexas.edu/jdm4372/files/2016/11/Slide16.png

1 comments

We already transmit data optically, that's what fiber optics is.
I'm talking about between chips and RAM of course because that's where the data/compute ratio is shrinking, not between Tokyo and New York.
the hard part is that currently electrical to optical conversions take a fair amount of space which would make them hard to do on CPU. it might be practical for storage to ram though, which would be really cool.