Bob Metcalfe, winner of the Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of computing,” for the co-invention of the Ethernet, will offer some thoughts at the upcoming COSM meet on what to expect “Beyond Chips, Silicon, and Data Centers.” (Agenda: Thursday, October 31, 9:15 am).

Riffing off the date (yes, that’s Hallowe’en), he asks, “Will we be spooked by the coming terahertz waferscale paradigm?”

Spooked by the what?

Terahertz waves

The current speed of computers could be greatly improved greatly improved by accessing terahertz waves, industry leaders say. But those high frequency waves are hard to reach on the electromagnetic spectrum:

Between the beams of visible light and the blips of radio static, there lies a dead zone where our technology isn’t effective. It’s called the terahertz gap. For decades now, no one’s succeeded in building a consumer device that can transmit terahertz waves.”

Popular Science March 22, 2022

But terahertz technology is not impossible like time travel. It’s just hard in the same way that producing a single layer of graphene for computing was hard.

Handling terahertz waves economically enough for everyday use means overcoming many challenges.

Waferscale computing

Many powerful computer processors can be packed onto a giant wafer using graphene. When they are all together, they can achieve economies of scale that elude even powerful processors that are all working separately.

Like graphene, these new technologies work in principle but making them cost-competitive is an important next step.

Metcalfe’s Law

Bob Metcalfe’s philosophy of computer technology can be summed up in a law attributed to him, with assistance from tech philosopher George Gilder:

a network’s impact is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. The focus is on the number of possible connections among the nodes. For example, if a network has 10 nodes (i.e., computers, servers and/or connecting users), its proportional value is 100 (10 x 10). (Techopedia)

The significance of the law is much easier to understand if we switch to the negative case: “owning a single fax machine is useless. When there are two fax machines, you can communicate with one other person, but when there are millions, the device gains significant value.” (Techopedia)

The resulting massive increase in opportunities goes beyond simple numerical multiplication. With the internet, for example, we can communicate — in principle — with any of hundreds of millions of people, which is why the internet is transforming business and commerce around the globe.

Here’s an interview that business prof Jay Richards did with Metcalfe at COSM 2023 on the risks and rewards of the internet:

There’s still time to register for COSM here. Get a preview of our tech future that will help you make sense of the next two decades of changes.

You may also wish to read: COSM 2024: Learn more about the tech that will replace the chip. Tech philosopher George Gilder predicted the smartphone in the 1990s. His lineup of scitech greats can tell you what comes next. Wish you had known about the smartphone before 2000? – instead of the Y2K scare that dominated the headlines but came to nothing? Come to COSM!