http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/hp-corona/
QuoteHP Preps Laser-Powered Chip of the Future
By 2017, HP hopes to build a computer chip that includes 256 microprocessors tied together with beams of light.
Codenamed Corona, this laser-powered contraption would handle 10 trillion floating points operations a second. In other words, if you put just five of them together, you’d approach the speed of today’s supercomputers. The chip’s 256 cores would communicate with each other at an astonishing 20 terabytes per second, and they’d talk to memory at 10 terabytes a second. That means it would run memory-intensive applications about two to six times faster than an equivalent chip made with good, old-fashioned electric wires.
They can afford to work on stuff like this now they no longer employ me and Sn00ks (mainly Sn00ks).
I think the crucial word here is hopes