Oxford scientists create nanoscale electro-optical device

[HEXUS]

Elegantly bridging the photon-electron fields for faster and more efficient memory and CPUs.

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[philehidiot]

Whilst the obvious is obvious, what's this section about how it can operate simultaneously as electrical or optical memory and as a processor.... does this mean you could have a mesh of these things and dynamically allocate it to either memory operations or processing? Just imagine on RAM batch processing without sending it to the CPU for a simple operation applied to a large chunk of data. Then sent optically to the CPU to, as they say in certain specialist Dutch films.... finish the job.

[ByteMyAscii]

Whilst the obvious is obvious, what's this section about how it can operate simultaneously as electrical or optical memory and as a processor.... does this mean you could have a mesh of these things and dynamically allocate it to either memory operations or processing? Just imagine on RAM batch processing without sending it to the CPU for a simple operation applied to a large chunk of data. Then sent optically to the CPU to, as they say in certain specialist Dutch films.... finish the job.

No. What I understand this to be is that it doesn't matter what another component will output in terms of its individual bits, optical or electrical.
This will respond equally to either, rather than potentially having to "normalise" the bits to one or the other.
Any components can simply transmit out whatever is the most efficient or effective.
Sort of like interpreting Semaphore and Morse Code, it responds equally to either without having to change one to the other.