About Technology

By Julia Hall

One of the fundamental things that the electronics manufacturing business is increasingly reliant on is the ever increasing speed of computer processors. This is demonstrated in the way that software companies like Microsoft and computer chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD work in tandem. For example, the new Windows Vista operating system requires some pretty high powered hardware to perform well. Many of its advanced visual elements simply won't run (they'll revert back to a more standard look that you might associate with Windows XP) if the computer that's running Vista isn't equipped with the right kinds of graphics card.

Windows Vista is also designed to take advantage of sixty four bit dual core processors too. In this case, it's pretty obvious how someone who wants to run Windows Vista might also want to run it on a more powerful computer. Thus the introduction of Windows Vista creates a demand for more powerful computer hardware. One of the ways that people are trying to increase the speed of computers is to divide the work load of the computers among several different processors. There are a bunch of examples of this in a wide variety of machines coming on the market including video gaming systems like the Xbox 360 and Sony's Play Station 3. One type of computer that really benefits from this is the server. That's because servers often have to process requests for information from several different clients at once.

The problem with having multiple processors is that information can bottleneck when traffic among the processors gets heavy. The funny thing about this problem is that there isn't a consensus among computer scientists about what causes it. Some think that the processors themselves are fast enough but that they aren't adequately connected to each other through the pins that they use to transmit information among each other. Others think that the connections are fast enough, but that the signals collide when two signals try to go to the same processor at the same time.

One new and novel approach to conquering the problem (assuming that the later problem is in fact the cause) is to use lasers to transmit the signals among all of the processors. Currently data moves through computer systems via electrical impulses. Using electrical impulses to transmit data has two problems. First they require wires for transmission, and second they can interfere which each other. Lasers get around both problems. Lasers can be transmitted directly through the air, and they can pass right through each other.

Some researchers are taking advantage of these properties of lasers by designing a multiprocessor computer that uses lasers to send signals among conventional dual processor chips from Intel. Each chip will send the same signal to every other chip at the same time, and each chip is capable of receiving a laser signal. It's up to the receiving chip to sort out which packet of data is meant for it based on a unique set of information that comes with that signal. The chip then ignores all of the other signals that aren't addressed to it.

The result of this technology should theoretically be improved analysis of things that computers aren't very good at that humans can do with ease. These things include facial recognition, but the idea is that it could be done with computer speed.