Natural Environment Blog

In today’s hi-tech world, computers are a major contributor to greenhouse gases. IBM has announced a breakthrough that could change the way computer systems exchange information.

Instead of using wires to send digital data, IBM’s technology uses light pulses. By using light pulses, data can be sent at a much faster rate, and requires much less energy. Once the technology becomes mainstream, a consumer could download a high-definition movie in less than a second!

The optical technology was initially announced last year, but at that time, researchers had only managed to implement it in a custom environment. IBM have recently announced that they have been testing the technology with more standard computer parts. This means that devices using this technology could hit the market very soon.

According to IBM researcher Clint Schow:

These aren’t theoretical experiments or chips sitting in unique conditions in a lab, but rather chipsets that could hit the market in the next two years

The optical technology could just as easily be implemented in a mobile phone as it could, a supercomputer.

As great as sub-second movie downloads will be, there are more pressing applications that this technology can be used for. For example, doctors often need to transfer enormous medical images (as large as tens or hundreds of gigabytes) and these can take many minutes to transfer between devices. This could be a life/death situation. Another application could include scientists who need to work with gigantic data sets.

Now, before we get too excited, transferring data between computer systems is only going to be as fast as the slowest component. So in reality, it could actually be some time before we’re downloading movies from the internet within a second.

But far be it from me to only look at the negatives! Eventually this technology will equip us with faster computer systems that use less energy, and therefore are better for the environment.