"If" - they do not! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_mobility
Quoting from the above source...
>Typical electron mobility for Si at room temperature (300 K) is 1400 cm2/ (V·s) and the hole mobility is around 450 cm2/ (V·s).[2]
However this is besides the point since electric fields in a conductor do move at the speed of light.
TL;DR: "The speed at which energy or signals travel down a cable is actually the speed of the electromagnetic wave, not the movement of electrons. Electromagnetic wave propagation is fast and depends on the dielectric constant of the material. In a vacuum the wave travels at the speed of light and almost that fast in air."
Especially since there are some semi-conductors which actually require you to move electrons, like e.g. flash memory ;)
While this is technically possible with electronics as well by setting a different voltage limit it's much more effective with photonic computing and doesn't not increase the complexity of your base components as much.
The current designs for a photonic computer are also much more parallel most of them basically layers of LED's and detectors with a very fast LCD matrix which serves as a mask between them. if you have a 256x256 pixel screen you can perform an operation on 65536 bits in a single clock, if you stack them up you basically getting 1 order of magnitude with each layer this isn't something you could ever achieve with current solid state electronics.
You don't have to wait with processing for the electron from the beggining of the wire to get to the end?
So, the difference between photons and electrons speed as measured by the time it takes electronic and optical signal to move through the same distance - is insignificant.
Understatement. There are 50 trillion atoms in a cell, 50 trillion cells in a human body (give or take an order of magnitude or two for definitions and caveats). Furthermore, big swaths of chemistry/biochemistry are inherently quantum mechanical (classical mech + E&M doesn't explain why molecules snap into little geometric shapes, let alone how those shapes interact) which has god-awful asymptotic complexity on account of the "present state" of the system (wavefunction) being a probability for each possible configuration of the system rather than a description of a single configuration.
A purpose-built silicon supercomputer will struggle to simulate a single small protein using classical-mechanics approximations for a millisecond (and there are millions of those per cell and trillions of cells per body). There's a lot of room for improvement.
http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/08/06/exascale-breakthrough-weve...
"The analysis unit works in tandem with a traditional supercomputer. Initial models will start at 1.32 petaflops and will ramp up to 300 petaflops by 2020.
The Optalysys Optical Solver Supercomputer will initially offer 9 petaflops of compute power, increasing to 17.1 exaflops by 2020."
It doesn't compute "flops" like a traditional computer. The relevant text from the article:
"The prototype achieves a processing speed equivalent to 320 Gflops and it is incredibly energy efficient as it uses low-powered, cost effective components."
I am as interested as anybody in switching out for photons instead of electrons/holes. But please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
