i was hopeing to get the opinions of some linux wizards on a subject. no disrespect but if you could read the messages in the win2k forum on light speed processor and add your wisdom to the subject it would be greatly appreciated.

Let us just ignore that other thread. It has so many wrong ideas... Read here and here for some (technical) introductory material. Optical DSP's (the concept of which is not entirely exclusive to that developer in Israel) use the presence or absence of light for processing (still binary, still digital). Basically, this processor is faster (in some ways) because the processor computes via light, not voltage. Now it turns out (because this is physics and we can calculate these things - they did this with Matlab), that the threshold of light (at which the processor gates can tell that the light is on or off) can be detected faster than the threshold for voltage (electricity, what we use now). Therefore, the gates can change states faster. Now, this is all well and good, but for our applications we have a little more complexity. This particularly chip basically executes complex mathmatical calculations. In fact, that is where it's edge comes from - the designers have basically found a way to not only physically map their algorithms into the hardware (done before, AT&T Bell Labs), but also make the device a form of output (because as light passes through a lens it changes detectable states). But for memory and some more general applications, you are going to hit a very nasty bottleneck. In this fact, this DSP is not like all other DSP's. This chip needs something to send it signals - it does not get them from memory. This really only calculates and does not execute code in our sense. It is special-purpose. Why? Well, you can't easily reproduce for all calculations the parallel operation that optics allows for these certain types of mathmatical transformations (at least not yet). Furthermore, the cited benchmarks probably do not include memory fetching. Right now synchronising DSP's can result in a large expense of performance. Still, this is all very fast. The trick is to make all your components (memory, CPU, bus) optical as well, or you always have a (huge) bottleneck critical to the system (though it can be mediated).