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Comment by 4b11b4 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm... NNs will be at light speed..?

Are we still in the "glass era"?

light speed isn't really all that good when you remember that information in your electrical circuit is traveling as fast (if not faster) than light in the medium in this case. Sounds good in marketing, but the key here is bandwidth, not 'speed'

certainly -- not necessarily the raw velocity of light, but the ability to augment other properties of light to increase the bandwidth.

Is it correct then to say that augmenting the other properties of light increases overall information density/capacity of light as a medium? whereas with electricity we only have 2D: amplitude & freq?

definitely

faster?

Information in an electric circuit travels along that circuit at ~0.9c. The physical light pulses that are running through the optical waveguides are more or less traveling at around ~c/n, where n is the refractive index of the material (in this case silicon, so n ~ 3.5).

the actual optical "packet" of information is traveling slower than the electric "packet". The key here is that the electric packet can a few bits, while the photonic packet in theory has a much larger bandwidth.

Also keep in mind that photonics will generate practically zero heat and use less power overall, which will be great news for data centers.

Layman here. Isn't the big speed penalty in digital electronics the clock speed of the transistors changing state? Not the actual signal going down the wire from gate to gate?

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