Computing Update

Breakthrough in chip technology integrates light and electrical devices on the same chip to allow smaller, faster and more powerful computers:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33115.wss

and follow-up article:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/by-2018-supercomputers-could-operate-100-times-faster-than-the-human-brain

"The new technology could accelerate the performance of supercomputers a thousand times, taking us from the current 2.6 petaflops (1015 or quadrillion operations per second) Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer to an exaflop (1018 or a quintillion operations per second) supercomputer in just 8 years (“flops” stands for “floating point operations per second”). And that means a supercomputer that runs 100 times faster than a human brain operating at peak capacity, currently estimated to be around 1016 operations per second by Ray Kurzweil and others."