>Logic gates don’t work instantaneously though – there’s a delay on the order of nanoseconds as they process the inputs. That’s plenty fast enough for modern computers, but there’s always room for improvement. And now the Rochester team’s new logic gates blow them out of the water, processing information in mere femtoseconds, which are a million times shorter than nanoseconds.
This is a bit misleading, no? Sure, signal does take time in order of ns to pass through entire CPU units, but on the individual gate level aren't we talking of time in the picosecond range?
Remember back in the mid-90s when Intel was developing "Voxels" to use IR to communicate between layers? The little pyramid voxels allowed for faster communication with less engineering... (I cant quite recall -- this was a conversation I had in 1997 on a hike with then CPU guy at Intel... this was when I first learned of a 64-core lab-rat they were working on...)
This is a bit misleading, no? Sure, signal does take time in order of ns to pass through entire CPU units, but on the individual gate level aren't we talking of time in the picosecond range?