[HN Gopher] Fastest-ever logic gates could make computers a mill...
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Fastest-ever logic gates could make computers a million times
faster
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 130 points
Date : 2022-05-12 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newatlas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newatlas.com)
| perlgeek wrote:
| If I understood the logic correctly, if you think in terms of
| transistors, they had a laser on the gate and used that to
| control an electric charge.
|
| > To reach these extreme speeds, the team made junctions
| consisting of a graphene wire connecting two gold electrodes.
| When the graphene was zapped with synchronized pairs of laser
| pulses, electrons in the material were excited, sending them
| zipping off towards one of the electrodes, generating an
| electrical current.
|
| This is not what you typically call a "logic gate", where the
| control and the output have the same type of energy (either both
| electric or both photonic), this is more like a fast light
| sensor?
|
| There are plenty of good applications for fast light sensors, why
| this article tries to spin it into a logic gate (which it is not)
| is incomprehensible to me.
| andkon wrote:
| From wikipedia:
|
| > A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing
| a Boolean function, a logical operation performed on one or
| more binary inputs that produces a single binary output.
| Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic
| gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and unlimited
| fan-out, or it may refer to a non-ideal physical device
|
| As long as it implements a boolean function, which this clearly
| does, it sure sounds like a logic gate. What difference does it
| make whether the control and output have the same form of
| energy when the real thing that matters is the information it
| captures?
| perlgeek wrote:
| > What difference does it make whether the control and output
| have the same form of energy when the real thing that matters
| is the information it captures?
|
| A logic gate itself doesn't do much useful computation, you
| have to chain them together.
|
| But how do you chain them, if they use a laser beam as input
| and an electrical charge as output? You have to use the
| electrical charge to drive a laser... which is much slower
| and more energy intensive than a classical logic gate in a
| modern integrated circuit.
| sharikous wrote:
| Scalability, for one. A modern PC CPU has ~10^10 transistors
| forming ~10^9 logic gates that work because you can chain
| them easily.
| arithma wrote:
| Interesting to think how many 10^6 faster gates would be
| needed to do the work of 10^9 at the same speed. Say take
| the 8086 and make it a million times faster. At about 30K
| transistors and 5MHz. A photonic 8086 apparently would run
| blindingly fast around anything available now.
|
| Serial speed is always a gain up, no questions asked I
| guess.
|
| Obviously all of that is over simplified, and not
| considering other components to any system that would be
| built (but hey, it's not like any of this is happening
| tomorrow anyway).
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > What difference does it make whether the control and output
| have the same form of energy when the real thing that matters
| is the information it captures?
|
| Just thinking out loud, but it might break common assumptions
| about being able to (easily) compose a individual gates into
| a more complicated logic function.
| alloai wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03509.pdf
| scrubs wrote:
| Awesome - this is a good example of a recent post I saw on
| reddit: why should go to engineering school? cause of
| improvements like this. But they're gonna have to figure out how
| to get faster memory (maybe non Neumann) to make this really pay-
| off.
| behnamoh wrote:
| but most engineering programs aren't as cool as this.
| [deleted]
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Great, so soon it will take less time resolve the dependencies
| between our 5 billion obsolete, backdoored and crypto-stealing
| node dependencies! Perhaps we can use that power to create a new
| build tool because there aren't enough! /s
| [deleted]
| emkoemko wrote:
| just don't use dependencies write the stuff your self.
| majewsky wrote:
| I was going to say the same. Working in the software industry
| has made me so cynical about the nature of our craft, that
| every news of hardware improvement immediately makes me wonder
| how exactly we are going to squander it.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| So memory access will now be 1,000,000,000 times slower than
| register access.
|
| Which implies a maximum speed up of what ... 10% ?
| 0xy wrote:
| This seems analogous to the yearly battery breakthrough clickbait
| story promising 1 second charge times and 999 years of battery
| life if only a theoretical process is ever viable at a reasonable
| price.
| coding123 wrote:
| Those batteries do exist but they can only be charged with 99%
| efficient solar panels.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Like those radioactive diamond batteries...
| moron4hire wrote:
| In mice.
| [deleted]
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Headline in in 20 years:
|
| Javascript UI library that is compiled into another javascript UI
| library and used in almost all desktop applications now for some
| reason now TWO million times slower than native desktop widgets.
| Here's why you should convert your native application to it
| anyway!
| [deleted]
| emkoemko wrote:
| nothing wrong with using javascript in the UI, is it that much
| slower? i mean GNOME uses it and i can bring up the js console
| on my OS, does not seem to make any performance difference then
| something written in C++ etc.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I should think JS itself in the UI is "fine" if it's _just_
| JS we are talking about and not the DOM or other "web"
| technologies (a la Electron and co). After all, V8 is faster
| than the Python interpreter, and quite a lot of UIs are
| written in Python without it being a bottleneck - it's just a
| layer of glue pulling together various APIs and creating some
| sort of pipeline and none of the _actual_ performance-
| sensitive stuff is done in the interpreted language either
| way (except when you 're doing things like calculating stuff
| or sorting the contents of widget in Python or JS, etc. where
| inefficiencies in your code and in the language you are using
| begin to show - but those aren't strictly required to be part
| of your UI markup).
| anthk wrote:
| You are deluded if you think that. Even with DE's made with
| Mutter such as Budgie, the perf and smootness difference
| between the first and the second it's very noticeable.
|
| I would like Gnome if it supported Guile as the scripting
| language (now Guile 3 has a Jit) as an alternative to GJS.
| tiagod wrote:
| >Logic gates don't work instantaneously though - there's a delay
| on the order of nanoseconds as they process the inputs. That's
| plenty fast enough for modern computers, but there's always room
| for improvement. And now the Rochester team's new logic gates
| blow them out of the water, processing information in mere
| femtoseconds, which are a million times shorter than nanoseconds.
|
| This is a bit misleading, no? Sure, signal does take time in
| order of ns to pass through entire CPU units, but on the
| individual gate level aren't we talking of time in the picosecond
| range?
| samstave wrote:
| Remember back in the mid-90s when Intel was developing "Voxels"
| to use IR to communicate between layers? The little pyramid
| voxels allowed for faster communication with less
| engineering... (I cant quite recall -- this was a conversation
| I had in 1997 on a hike with then CPU guy at Intel... this was
| when I first learned of a 64-core lab-rat they were working
| on...)
| lnsru wrote:
| I can remember carbon nano tubes and graphene mentioned couple
| decades ago in nanotechnology lectures by amazing professor. I
| was exited to live in a different future back then. But back in
| the reality nowadays I use Ryzen 3950x to program 28 nm CMOS
| FPGAs. I am still curious what manufacturing technology can
| replace silicon CMOS for worldwide electronics manufacturing.
| motohagiography wrote:
| If I remember correctly, quantum computers went from theory to
| prototype in a decade. What are the barriers to modelling a core
| that uses these in software and then effectively printing them,
| and adding a conventional computer interface at the edge?
| simulate-me wrote:
| Quantum computers were theorized in 1980, and there still isn't
| even a basic prototype. 18 years later, the first 2-qubit
| quantum computer was built. There still isn't anything usable
| after 40 years.
| cesaref wrote:
| If speed was held back by gate time, then sure, but i'd have
| thought that propagation delays between gates will be kind of
| relevant.
|
| Making the clock 1,000,000 times faster would mean the silicon
| would be 1,000,000 times shorter (in each dimension) so I guess
| such designs would support some super high clock rates for some
| specialist applications for small gate arrays, but for general
| purpose computing, hmm, i'm not so sure.
| kazinator wrote:
| Propagation delay isn't purely about distance: it's about the
| time needed for the output to settle in reaction to inputs.
| That includes capacitive delays: containers of electrons having
| to fill up.
|
| Say we are talking about some gate with a 250 picosecond
| propagation delay.
|
| But light can travel 7.5 cm in that time; way, way larger than
| the chip on which that gate is found, let alone that gate
| itself. That tells you that the bottleneck in the gate isn't
| caused by the input-to-output distance, which is tiny.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Ya the article focuses on computing but I think it could enable
| totally new electronic devices like frequency/phase
| controllable leds, light field displays and cameras, ultra fast
| ir based wifi etc...
| skykooler wrote:
| I could see this potentially allowing VLB interferometry for
| optical frequencies, allowing even higher resolutions than
| the Event Horizon Telescope.
| zardo wrote:
| I think that's fast enough for gravity gradiometry on a chip.
| zardo wrote:
| That is, by just putting a clock on each corner and
| counting their relative ticks.
| amelius wrote:
| Think pipelining ...
| btown wrote:
| Photonic computing, to accelerate both logic gates and data
| transfer, is an incredibly broad and exciting field. While a lot
| of the promise is still in the lab, real advances are currently
| being commercialized.
|
| https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/marapr-2022/harnessing...
|
| https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/03/17/luminous-shines-a-li...
| fullstackchris wrote:
| I always had the idea that before jumping to quantum, it would
| make sense to use photons for as many components as possible
| instead of the relatively slower, heavier, and much hotter
| electron.
|
| I don't know enough about computing hardware to know how
| feasible each component is to be refactored this way, but it is
| indeed exciting. You could almost imagine such a "photon
| computer" as a computer which uses little to no energy (at
| least for the actual computing part), is extremly lightweight
| due to lightweight components, and never gets hot!
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| By "lightweight", do you mean the weight of photons?
| tragictrash wrote:
| On a larger scale, the Meta Quest 2 uses a USB cable to plug
| into the computer so you can play VR games on your PC. The
| max length of the cable is something like 3 feet over copper.
| The link cable they sell switches from electric signals over
| copper to light over fiber, and then back to copper to get
| around the length limitations.
|
| Not really the same thing but still cool!
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Any decent quality standard copper USB-C cable works fine,
| typically 15ft
| tragictrash wrote:
| There's multiple data rates that it can run at, the
| highest has a reduced length over copper
| cutler wrote:
| Can't wait. Finally an end to "Rails is slow".
| dkersten wrote:
| Don't worry, we will still find ways to make the software slow.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Oh there will still be many ways to make fun of rails, don't
| you worry
| onion2k wrote:
| Imagine running two Electron apps at the same time!
| eigenform wrote:
| Other good news is, if photonics is a viable path forward from
| traditional CMOS, in the distant future we can have "hardware"
| and "lightware" :)
| [deleted]
| smm11 wrote:
| So Wall Street can pillage us at an even greater rate.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Retr0id wrote:
| For anyone else wondering, the "1000000x faster" claim is based
| on a theoretical clock speed upper bound of 1PHz
| https://newatlas.com/electronics/absolute-quantum-speed-limi...
|
| > The team says that other technological hurdles would arise long
| before optoelectronic devices reach the realm of PHz.
| joshcryer wrote:
| You can read the paper here:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29252-1
|
| I can see this technology being made into a super computer type
| setup one day, but as far as home computing, I have my doubts.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > > The team says that other technological hurdles would arise
| long before optoelectronic devices reach the realm of PHz.
|
| Yup... just the memory access (even if "instant", ram is so
| "far away" (physically) that the transmission delay will be
| many multiples of the clock... Currently this is a pain to
| implement correctly by the CPU manufacturers, but atleast with
| caches you don't run out of data to calculate while waiting for
| something new from RAM.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Not only, that, modern CPUs have transistors that switch in 0.1
| ns. So even if they got to that speed, it would be 100,000x,
| not 1,000,000x.
|
| And, if they only got to switching in 10 femtoseconds, it would
| be 10,000x, not 1,000,000x.
|
| You might ask, what's two orders of magnitude between friends?
| But a job that takes a minute is quite a lot different from one
| that takes going on two hours.
| universal_sinc wrote:
| Even 0.1ns is way slow. A modern silicon cmos gate will
| switch under 10ps, which is how we can fit 25+ gates in a
| single cycle at >3GHz. Everyone should remember that cpu
| frequency is not the same as the frequency a single gate can
| switch. Also keep in mind we are mostly wire limited anyway,
| as resistivity of copper at <50nm line widths is quite unlike
| its bulk resistivity, and scales super-linearly. This
| prevents us from further shrinking wires at all.
| kardos wrote:
| > resistivity of copper
|
| Could we use a superconductor here instead of copper in
| order to achieve further wire shrinkage? Eg, if it were to
| be operated in a datacentre where it's plausible to power
| the cooler needed to keep it cold. The amount of
| superconducting material would be quite small
| picture wrote:
| Microfabrication is quite an art. Being able to image
| pieces of copper down to such ludicrously small sizes
| with techniques like EUV and optical proximity correction
| is already quite advanced. Doing it for high temperature
| superconductors like YBCO is definitely not trivial. I
| don't think superconductors are a good idea due to the
| reduced fidelity, you might as well just use normal
| conductors and spread them out for better cooling
| 01100011 wrote:
| > To reach these extreme speeds, the team made junctions
| consisting of a graphene wire connecting two gold electrodes.
| When the graphene was zapped with synchronized pairs of laser
| pulses, electrons in the material were excited, sending them
| zipping off towards one of the electrodes, generating an
| electrical current.
|
| > "It will probably be a very long time before this technique can
| be used in a computer chip..."
|
| So this is interesting, but largely irrelevant for most HN folks.
| We'll be retired before it is productized.
| jugad wrote:
| Speak for yourself... in the great Amurica, most can't afford
| to retire.
| yoyopa wrote:
| computation is just one technique to solve problems. we should
| also invest in our god-talkers, who may be able to use divination
| or offerings to accomplish the same goals.
| colecut wrote:
| Can you point me to a reliable God talker
| kayson wrote:
| At a size on the order of 1um, it's going to be a long, long
| while before this becomes a commercially viable competitor to
| bulk cmos. Doesn't matter much for a CPU if your transistor can
| switch 1000000X faster if you can only have 1/1000th of them on a
| die. Your speed would ultimately be limited by the physical wire
| delays anyways. Not to mention that it's using "exotic" process
| steps which means capacity is, at minimum, decades away from
| being meaningful.
|
| Don't get me wrong, the research is cool, but it's not going to
| make "computers a million times faster".
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What about ASIC built with this for breaking crypto?
| ChrisClark wrote:
| You'd still probably need multiple universes full of these
| faster chips. Numbers in cryptography are terrifyingly huge.
| Thiez wrote:
| Key sizes are generally chosen so that brute force is
| infeasable even with enormous speed advancements. You cannot
| increment a counter to 2^256. There isn't enough energy in
| our solar system. So you cannot brute force 256 bit symmetric
| key encryption using traditional computers. Not at any speed.
| ithkuil wrote:
| yeah; to get a sense of how big 2^256 is: assuming you can
| increment a counter at 1PHz rate, it would take 91 million
| years to iterate over 2^256 values.
| georgia_peach wrote:
| What if it ends up in a USB scenario--fewer wires, but running
| at a higher speed? 4-8x smaller word size to get +10e6 sounds
| like a good trade. Just think, Z80s & 6502s coming back into
| fashion. This time, turbo-charged!
|
| Chuck Moore was kind of on that beat already with his
| GreenArrays chips.
|
| It will definitely be a while, but maybe not such a long one.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Didn't even read it, responding to the headline alone. No they
| can't.
|
| Will edit after reading more about why they can't. Which I stand
| by, as the blockchain is my witness, they just can't.
|
| EDIT: I shouldn't have bothered checking, yes a Petahertz is a
| million times a Gigahertz, but that's the only thing they've got
| to ride on. So the size of the chip at that point comes into
| play, and it would have to be 3D, so then will it have a
| dimension left for the laser. Well I think a Terahertz would be
| possible, for sure. But later, like in the fifties. After
| researching other questions and finding answers to this question
| in a roundabout way.
| rambojazz wrote:
| I'm waiting for the experts to chime in and explain why this is
| in fact not going to happen, before I even bite on that title.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I'm waiting for the experts to chime in and explain why this
| is in fact not going to happen, before I even bite on that
| title.
|
| As 01100011 points out
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356408), the article
| itself already does that:
|
| > It will probably be a very long time before this technique
| can be used in a computer chip ....
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(page generated 2022-05-12 23:00 UTC)