Hasta La Gadget!

Whenever we uncover promising new research into lasers, we can generally be sure that it will sound really awesome, and that it will be a long time before it trickles down to the consumer electronics scene (if ever). That said, research into light powered computing has shown considerable promise — with some folks estimating that commercial laser-drive hybrids (with picosecond pulse lasers doing the work that magnetic read/write heads once did — something considered impossible until very recently) will be available in five years time. Although the first drives will only achieve a humble 1 TBits/s, in the future we might see femtosecond-based laser drives reaching speeds beyond 100TBits/s. And you know what they say… that’s a lot of terabits.