> A new optical switch is, at 1 trillion operations per second, between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today's leading commercial electronic transistors No, a

> A new optical switch is, at 1 trillion operations per second, between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today's leading commercial electronic transistors No, a CPU's clock speed is not the speed at which its transistors can transition. Clocks are multiple gates long (roughly, 10-20), and are not the only delays in a system. So a CPU running at a clock speed of 5 GHz could reasonably be switching each transistor at a rate approaching 100 GHz. (Most of the time each individual transistor is not switching, since only their last switch within a clock cycle is typically meaningful.)