So I been thinking for some time that optic fibre would be very effective in CPUs and then I wondered, why aren't anyone making them? So now I've turned to you guys? Why aren't you making CPUs using optic fibre instead of whatever material you use now? And I think this would be something for AMD to go for now as you have fallen quite far behind Intel.

The same reason they don't make car brakes out of aluminum.

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Intel has been doing it or researching it since 2009...

IBM has their Holey Optochip.

There are IEEE articles regarding this from 2002.

Even at this point they are mainly research topics.

 

Makes sense in giant server farms, but not in a SOHO setup.

 

Plenty of reading here:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=active&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=optic+interconnects+in+cpus&oq=optic+interconnects+in+cpus&gs_l=hp.3...2715.7723.0.8668.29.28.1.0.0.4.1444.8185.0j13j9j2j0j3j0j1.28.0.les%3Bernk_timediscountb..0.0...1c.1.jASFmbAQLcA&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.1355325884,d.cGE&fp=1a3768278019f5af&bpcl=39967673&biw=1660&bih=900

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Physics? Ha! This is clearly magic and devilry at work. Prepare firewood! We have witches to burn!

 

Senior Engineering Technician (AEET).

The optical interconnect will allow a CPU to send signals at the speed of light! 

Ok, seriously... that's not why people are interested in optical interconnects.

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Troll Hunter

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And with high performance applications moving to a GPU, the importance of a monolithic Über high performance CPU is decreasing.

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Not really the same deal dude... they both have copper interconnects now... there's no reason that I know of why the interconnects in CPUs and GPUs would have to be different.

Also, GPU computing works best for data parallel applications.  There's a lot of stuff which doesn't fit into that group, so there's still going to be plenty of CPU intensive tasks out there.

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Troll Hunter

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That's why I said High Performance, the HPC sector which currently is dominated by Tesla with a few Fire based ones in there. No argument that computers even up to the university grade will mostly be CPU only for years to come, but even today's Über CPU's, the Intel Xeon Phi's, aren't really necessary in many cases.

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The point was, some apps probably won't ever make use of GPU computing, because they wouldn't benefit from it.  Some applications will even show a performance decrease when run in parallel compared to serial execution.  It's not a question of resources... it's just the inherent behavior of the software.

Square peg vs round hole... pushing harder doesn't make it work any better.

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Troll Hunter

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Edited: 12/14/2012 at 08:45 PM by Mime