The future of CPU's

So as I read the IDF article, this one just published and previous, I see that Intel is begining to experiement with laser/light transmission for processors rather than traditional means. Apparently they said if successful it will allow much faster transfer rates and speeds. I also wonder, if this will mean that it won't need nearly as much cooling? I suppose you still need to power the lasers, but the overall heat generated would be less than today's procs yes?
Anyway...I think this is a very exciting time..With the quads coming available already in November! And did you see that bloody 16-core computer? Wow. What do you use, and how, do you connect 4 motherboards together? I take it they are server motherboards with a specific port to do this yes?
What's eveyone's thoughts on this? Do you think these laser procs will replace traditional ones? 10 years? 5 years? Do you think the proc industry is moving WAAAYY to fast for the software writers to catch up?

Maybe 15-20 years out for a laser based CPU, probably longer for consumers. We'll see them first in very specialized chips such as for communications. Then they'll trickle down into the high end servers. Maybe consumer CPU's, a long time from now. The PC would become to unbalanced. First we'll need standards for a new motherboard design, interconnects, bus, memory, graphics, etc. Not to mention much faster disks, or the demise of mechanical disks and move us onto 500GB flash drives. A super fast CPU won't mean much if the rest of the system is 100x slower.

Software developers don't have to do much worrying about hardware. Almost nobody writes driectly to hardware anymore (very specialized cases). Any program will just run faster like it does now when moving to a faster CPU.

in the future, we dont measure the cpu's performance in GHz but in number of cores.

Like mr_fnord said, near-term optical devices will be used for comms & system interconnects; optical computing ("optical" processors) are still far from a< desktop near you.


Cheers!