My take on this is that within your computer it has two primary benefits:It would appear that it could make distributed processing transcendently more practical than at present. You might abandon the concept of a "central" processing unit and make an array of smart RAM chips instead - each with its own on-chip processing capability, and each better able to communicate with each of the others than present electronic communication between the CPU and RAM chips on the motherboard.
- facilitate making data paths across a cpu
- facilitate communication of data from one chip to another, bypassing - probably eliminating - the motherboard.
You would package the chips in a 3-D array rather than restricting yourself to a plane. The only electrical connections would be dc power to the chips; you would pack the chips in a roughly spherical clump - as tightly together as heat dissipation requirements allowed.
The interconnects between chips is the primary bottleneck in data transmission on a motherboard. When you use copper traces (the current method) you have to deal with transmission loss due to heat (higher resistance) as well as high frequency "crosstalk" between trace lines. Both are driving factors on board layout. Using light will eliminate both variable which should free up board designers to consider possibility they had once discarded because of interconnect problems.
Oops, my computer is down... I'll have to go in and blow out the dust...