Light vs electricity ?

[fishyfinners]

I was wondering how long before AMD/intel start using light instead of electricity
as the speed of light is in theory much faster than electricity
@ 3000000000m/s for light and 6216016m/s for electricity
or maybe even motherboards in theory could use it ?
light can also be converted to dc or can use photocells


am i mad or will this never happen

 

[Computerrock1]

Right now we can't even master a simple optical audio connection. SPDIF has lagging issues, where the first bit of data is missed by the time of processing.

 

[fazers_on_stun]

Hmm, where did you get that number for the "speed" of electricity? According to Wiki, the propagation speed of an EM field depends on the dielectric constant of the material, so that in an unshielded copper cable it is about 96% of the speed of light "c" in a vacuum, and in a coax cable about 66% of c. In a modern IC operating at GHz frequencies, the signal interconnects most closely resemble a transmission line (distributed impedance), which in turn is a more general case of a coax cable. So the speed of propagation using copper or aluminum conductors as the interconnects is about 2/3rds the speed of light, or 200,000,000 meters per second - far greater than your 6,216,016 meters per second.

Now optical switching - using photonic switches instead of transistors to steer information - would be much faster from what I've read.

 

[fishyfinners]

nope but you copied that XD
Electrons do have mass so they cannot quite reach the speed of light even in a perfect vacuum

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Yes they can, thru gravity

 

[fazers_on_stun]

ctually I took a graduate-level VLSI design course a couple decades ago, while pursuing an MSEE, which is where I remembered having to model signal interconnects as transmission lines when dealing with high frequency signals.

True that electrons can never attain the velocity of light, but it's not the electrons that carry the signal. They just help transport the EM field, which is what carries the signal. If you had a perfect vacuum (i.e., no electrons), the EM field signal still propagates (and at the speed of light). IIRC the actual speed of individual electrons in a conductor is quite small. And that field propagates at about 2/3rds the speed of light in the average integrated circuit.

A conductor merely confines the EM field ("electromotive force") to a particular volume and direction, as opposed to empty space where it would spread out in all directions and lose strength according to the inverse square of the distance traveled. Hence a conductor can transport an EM field signal with little or no loss (zero loss in the case of a superconductor). The conduction band electrons in the conductor just go along for the ride, like surfing down an ocean wave.

 

[fazers_on_stun]

Yes they can, thru gravity

Hmm, that would violate Einstein's special theory of relativity, in which any particle with rest mass (which hence excludes photons), requires an increasing amount of energy as it asymptotically approaches the speed of light. Since E = MC^2, the effective mass also increases. In other words, all the mass-enery in the entire universe would not be enough to move that electron's velocity all the way to c, and that electron would have the effective mass of the entire universe.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Ever see light or any other objects in a black hole?
I know the theory, its just that black holes leave black holes in it sometimes Asking here, did Einstein know the weight of a blackhole then as well?
Also, whats the weight of infinity? Or was that of the known universe at the time?
Also, what was the theorhetical age of the universe at the time, and the collected mass of the blackholes we never saw, or never will?
OK, nevermind, just wonderin heheh

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Well, heres an attempt here
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4208704/Light-Peak-panned-by-OEM-and-report?pageNumber=0

 

[fishyfinners]

wow kinda skiped the question a little i just wanted to know if they were planing on using light in pc internal components any time in the near future " as it may be faster " thanks though

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Not near, but eventually

 

[fazers_on_stun]

Ever see light or any other objects in a black hole?
I know the theory, its just that black holes leave black holes in it sometimes Asking here, did Einstein know the weight of a blackhole then as well?
Also, whats the weight of infinity? Or was that of the known universe at the time?
Also, what was the theorhetical age of the universe at the time, and the collected mass of the blackholes we never saw, or never will?
OK, nevermind, just wonderin heheh

Heh, just saw your response so I'm posting a reply a bit late ..

Anyway, you can think of a black hole in several ways - 1st, the event horizon (which is where a black hole goes "black" - i.e., the Schwarzchild radius) bends spacetime into what looks like a completely black sphere in 3 dimensions, no idea what it looks like in 4 - a tunnel maybe, since time travel is theoretically possible. So light trapped inside the event horizon just travels endlessly inside, as it's local universe is pinched-off from ours. 2nd - since a black hole is equivalent to a bottomless gravitational well, light trapped at a certain depth (below the event horizon) does not possess sufficient energy to escape. A photon's energy is Planck's constant times its frequency (or 2 x pi that amount, I forget). As its frequency can never drop below zero (at least in the physical universe as we currently know it), all those photons trapped below the event horizon threshold would emerge with zero or negative frequency, and thus be undetectable to us. 3rd - since time slows down the deeper you go into a gravitational well, it appears to stop completely to us on the outside, at the event horizon. Hence those photons are frozen in time at the event horizon, or perhaps proceed backwards in time below the event horizon .

Black holes are one of the predictable results of Einsteins general theory of relativity, which is the general case of the special theory, so yes the two are completely consistent with each other. It is quantum mechanics that doesn't fit in with general relativity (at least in a 4-dimensional universe - it does appear to reconcile with general relativity if we live in a 10 or 11-dimensional universe as per string or M-theory).

IIRC current estimates of the observable universe's age is around 13 billion years, and no it does not have infinite mass or extent. And black holes do evaporate with time, due to Hawking radiation from spontaneous matter-antimatter particle generation in empty space at the event horizon. Apparently the probabilities are such that one of particles tend to get captured within the black hole while the other escapes, which means the mass of the black hole decreases. Current theory predicts that a solar-mass black hole that does not receive incoming mass, will evaporate in about 10^67 years. Even the billion-plus solar mass black holes at the center of many galaxies (incl. our own Milky Way) will eventually evaporate in something like 10^150 years.

 

[jaguarskx]

Ever see light or any other objects in a black hole?
I know the theory, its just that black holes leave black holes in it sometimes Asking here, did Einstein know the weight of a blackhole then as well?
Also, whats the weight of infinity? Or was that of the known universe at the time?
Also, what was the theorhetical age of the universe at the time, and the collected mass of the blackholes we never saw, or never will?
OK, nevermind, just wonderin heheh

Don't wanna blow holes in your statement, but I assume you meant to state "mass of a blackhole" since weight as determined by gravity. Gravity in turn is determined by mass.

 

[damasvara]

Personally, I think a "meter per second" speed standard would be a non-issue for the current 45 "nanometer" AMD CPU built, moreover the 32nm Intel's.

As for the motherboards, it's not even half of meter in diameter, with space between components even shorter. Divide the 3 billion m/s and the 6 million m/s to three and we'll have 1B/s and 2M/s, respectively. Assuming the rest of the hardware have also evolved to the light speed concept, the theoretical difference is approximately 500:1. That's after a 2 million seconds or 555.555,55 hours of comparison. Something we'll probably need later on in far space exploration project to another galaxy. I'm not being sarcastic here, on the contrary, very objective. Unless someone else here has another idea about the application of this concept.

Interesting issue though. You're not mad for thinking something like this up. In fact, I kinda like it. Add some jokes about dark matter, flux capacitors and pixie dust and I'm in!

The comments above made my head smoking due to overload... :lol:

EDIT: I had to revise a few statements, the calculation is too simplified, it went totally wrong!