1/16/2025 at 10:51:24 PM
I wonder if this hardware could shake things up in a "what cryptographic hashing algorithms are currently secure" senseby sam0x17
1/16/2025 at 11:26:36 PM
That's going to depend on feature size, isn't it?Assuming parallel work, 100 1GHz circuits are going to be as fast as a single 100GHz circuit. If that 100GHz circuit is significantly more than 100x larger it is probably going to be significantly more expensive to build, which means it won't be attacking any hashes any time soon.
These optical circuits aren't drop-in replacements for transistors, let alone direct replacements at 2025 transistor sizes. I expect they will be more attractive for SERDES applications, taking a single-lane high-speed serial optical interconnect and turning it into a wide bundle of parallel low-speed optical lanes, which are in turn converted to electronic signals and fed to a regular transistor-based chip. It would allow for 100GHz IO without needing silicon running at 100GHz.
by crote
1/17/2025 at 7:45:55 AM
It's currently impractical to get optical waveguides to perform comparable to the state of the art for electronics. Optical waveguides are the equivalent of a wire on a chip.Intel 4 "fin and minimum metal pitch of 30 nm" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process - keep in mind, the actual channel is about half that. 15 nm photons are at the extreme end of UV, which is hard enough. But what really kills photonics miniaturization is the diffraction limit. The photons scatter in every direction.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-semiconductor-technology-not-sh...
by sounds