ONE TRILLION BITS PER SECOND FOR ROBOTIC BRAINS???
Equal to 500 high-def movies downloaded in one second!
Last Thursday at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles, a team from IBM presented research on their wonderfully-named “Holey Optochip.” The prototype chipset is the first parallel optical transceiver that is able to transfer one trillion bits (or one terabit) of information per second. To put that in perspective, IBM states that 500 high-def movies could be downloaded in one second at that speed, while the entire U.S. Library of Congress web archive could be downloaded in an hour. Stated another way, the Optochip is eight times faster than any other parallel optical components currently available, with a speed that’s equivalent to the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users, if they were using regular 10 Mb/s high-speed internet.
For decades, scientists have dreamed of building computer systems that could replicate the human brain’s talent for learning new tasks. Plasticity is the new phenomenon developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology- MIT, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory. The MIT researchers have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt in response to new information.
