Many Ars readers love to argue the details of different computer architectures. Cache implementations, pipelines, and other minutiae are all put under the microscope and declared wanting by someone (and excellent by others). From my perspective, all commercial computer architectures are the same, and you have to leave the world of silicon to find radically different computers.
And radical is what we have received from groups of Japanese and American researchers. They have used light pulses, circulating in a fiber optic racetrack, to create a computer that is very scalable—and seemingly pretty fast.
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