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by dekhn 902 days ago
I imagine they're not talking about changing the drift velocity, but the rate of information propagation through the EM wave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity versus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity

I don't know if increasing the speed of electricity has real implications for small circuits; I guess it could make a nearly factor of 2 difference for long copper wires, but we use fiber for long connections anyway, and speed of light in glass is higher than speed of electricity in copper.

1 comments

Distance is a limiting factor for memory bandwidth and other long circuits, but I'm not sure a speed up of 2x is feasible?