The simulation world is going to see dramatic increases in fidelity over the next few years.  Moores Law basically states a quadrupling of "power" every 4 years.   These technology leaps are about to give us a huge amount of power to play with.  NVIDIA have stated their GPU's will be 12 times more powerful in 12-18 months.  Now IBM have released information which is a game changer.  Its powerful plus energy efficient.  The latter being an issue with the current set of chips and technology.  It consumes power and makes heat.

Take a read from an extract from a recent Press Release from IBM.

Last Thursday at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles, a team from IBM presented research on their wonderfully-named "Holey Optochip." The prototype chipset is the first parallel optical transceiver that is able to transfer one trillion bits (or one terabit) of information per second. To put that in perspective, IBM states that 500 high-def movies could be downloaded in one second at that speed, while the entire U.S. Library of Congress web archive could be downloaded in an hour. Stated another way, the Optochip is eight times faster than any other parallel optical components currently available, with a speed that's equivalent to the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users, if they were using regular 10 Mb/s high-speed internet.

One of the unique features of parallel optic chips is the fact that they can simultaneously send and receive data.