Thread: Chrome OS Announced

Originally Posted by Demon Parasite

Yeah, I hear HP is also working on a way to send data through lasers instead of wires, and it will be incredibly fast.

Fiber optics? Or something beyond that?

Tachyons!

Originally Posted by Marvo

Fiber optics? Or something beyond that?

Tachyons!

if it's what I think he means,
it's a way for the CPU to communicate with external components (RAM, chipset components, etc.) via a bus of optical flashes, rather than a bus of electrical pulses.
effectively eliminating the copper trunks on motherboards

Originally Posted by Ynot

if it's what I think he means,
it's a way for the CPU to communicate with external components (RAM, chipset components, etc.) via a bus of optical flashes, rather than a bus of electrical pulses.
effectively eliminating the copper trunks on motherboards

Yes, that is it. A friend told me something about it and I didn't hear all of it, but yes, it is supposed to eliminate the use of copper.

That would be very useful and dramatically increase speed. IBM is working on something like that. Unfortunately, since no PCs use PPC processors anymore, I think servers will benefit the most, at least until the other processors catch up.

RAM is already as close to the cpu as possible and it's still not fast enough, most of the time you CPU is actually waiting for the RAM. Electricity through insulated copper travels at about 80% the speed of light, eliminating that lag will dramatically increase speed.

If that were to be implimented, would you have to have an OS that supports it? Or would it give automatic benefits?

It's be a hardware benefit, so nothing would change in the software, not even at the HAL.