Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling… - Peter Diamandis

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Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second) — or one hundred times faster than the human brain.