Record-breaking chip can transmit 1.8 petabits per second
I'm eventually foreseeing a whole new form of cache.  A coil of optical fiber with the cache data constantly inflight around that loop.  With denser optical data transmissions the amount of data per meter of coil starts increasing.<p>At this speed, we are already talking 2% of the entire Internet traffic in the length of a single fiber between the shortest point between the UK and USA.  That's just a single fiber.  As transducers of this ability get cheaper and cheaper, all those unused dark fibers start to offer up alternative uses with inflight-caches.  Think of how much memory would be needed to store that amount of data, how much that costs and even with the costs of fiber, things would start.