With $44 million USD in funds from the Pentagon, Sun will attempt to overcome many bottlenecks that manufacturers are facing today. The goal is to move information faster. According to Sun, processors that are thousands of times faster than ones we have today will be possible if the project is successful.
Today, chips communicate with each other using copper connects, and interconnects for inner-chip communications. Inherent with chip designs, the more bandwidth that's required, the more physical copper lanes are required as well as higher speed processing. With devices shrinking and space consumption becoming a hot direction for the industry, continually adding more lanes is impractical. Replacing a 32 physical lane bus with one that uses one laser lane with higher bandwidth, is the goal.
ppo: millisec