A friend gave me this link and wanted to share it.  Thought it was extremely interesting.  The part I liked was: "...using light instead of wires, as much as 100 times more information can be sent between cores, while using 10 times less power and consequently generating less heat"
 
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/ [...] /23700.wss
 
Maybe we are looking at the beginning of the CPU evolution/revolution from the x86 architecture everyone has been begging for

I have seen suggestions on using photonics such as holographic storage but CPUs...this is interesting.

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Wow, two thumbs up NikyWilliams.

Old news. Intel has been trying to do this earlier.  
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/po [...] -4631.html
^2005
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/inte [...] 25867.html

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E2180 @3.2Ghz + P35DS3L +8400GS (700/475 OC)  

This was also on Tom's main page a couple days ago. They've been working on this for a while. IBM Envisions On-chip Optical Network For Future Processors | Tom's Hardware

Still awesome cool

Here's the Xbit Labs article:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other [...] Chips.html

It will be interesting to see it implemented in future AMD CPU's. Whether that will as early as 2012 or late as 2020 is a guess. Coming up with an idea is the first step, engineering it is the next step, implementing it is the final step (unless you count marketing). One thing IBM is good at is innovative research.