Newest toy brings light speed to pc
by Rawly Bransom, Reporter

   I often watch movies and think I would love to have some of the toys the characters have. I see their guns, their computers, their cars and all the other wonderful gadgets and say, “If I could only have that just once.”
   I know I’ll probably never get a Lamborghini or laser rifle, but maybe I could get one of their computers.
   In movies, computers never take 10 minutes to boot up, and the information instantly appears. And don’t forget the graphics that border on holographic pictures instead of a flat screen.
   An Israeli company, MILCOM, says it has developed a new processor that just might make this dream come true. This processor’s speed won’t be measured in bytes or even megabytes per second but at the speed of light.
   That’s right—the speed of light. The processor will use optics instead of silicon. The current prototype performs 8 trillion operations per second.    That alone is equal to a whole supercomputer and is a thousand times faster than any processor developed to date.
   The current processor, the size of a palm-pilot, uses 256 micro-lasers to perform computations.
   This is the wave of the future. This is the technology that starts us down all those sci-fi movie paths. This could allow robotics to develop R2-D2 from Star Wars or, unfortunately, the evil machines from The Matrix.
   The company is currently marketing the processor to militaries, government agencies and airports around the world. MILCOM representatives’ say this version is geared more toward applications like high-resolution radar (HDR?), electronic warfare (hackers of the world unite), luggage screenings at airports (no that’s a hair dryer with a silencer), video compression, weather forecasting (could make the first accurate weather forecast) and cellular base stations (can you hear me now?).
   In the next few months, the company promises to have the processor down to around 15x15 cm. It also claims to be working on even smaller versions and promises the processor will be down to conventional computer chip size within the next five years.
   All in all, it is the dream of every little boy, and a few not so little, to own a robot or even light-speed X Box.
   The stars seem the limit for technology such as this, and maybe even beyond the stars.
   Could optic processing be the final component we need to reach out beyond the confines of the earth and truly set foot on another planet?
   That answer will be left to the future, but no matter the answer, one thing is crystal clear.
   With the help of MILCOM, the future is definitely upon us.