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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Optical Chip Promises 350x Speedup Over RTX 3080 in Some Algorithms [tomshardware.com]

Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world's first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is "hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080." 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.

[...] The [Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE)] is a somewhat narrow engine when it comes to what exact workloads it can execute. But, as the company says, "PACE efficiently searches for solutions to several of the hardest computational math problems, including the Ising problem, and the graph Max-Cut and Min-Cut problems, illustrating the real-world potential of integrated photonics in advanced computation." In that perspective, we can classify it as an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) of sorts: it does very few things (or a single thing) very, very well.

Research Opens the Door to Fully Light-Based Quantum Computing [tomshardware.com]

A team of researchers with Japan's NTT Corporation, the Tokyo University, and the RIKEN research center have announced the development [hpcwire.com] of a full photonics-based approach to quantum computing. Taking advantage of the quantum properties of squeezed light [rp-photonics.com] sources, the researchers expect their work to pave the road towards faster and easier deployments of quantum computing systems, avoiding many practical and scaling pitfalls of other approaches. Furthermore, the team is confident their research can lead towards the development of rack-sized, large-scale quantum computing systems that are mostly maintenance-free.

CPUs Could Use 85 Percent Fewer Transistors With New Adaptive Tech [tomshardware.com]

A team of researchers [scitechdaily.com] with the Vienna University of Technology have evolved computing's most fundamental unit: the transistor. Tapping into the element Germanium (Ge), they've developed a new, adaptive transistor design that can change its configuration on the fly, according to the workload requirements. The potential of it, you ask? Enormous, as it could enable using up to 85% fewer transistors than current approaches. Furthermore, with fewer transistors operating for the same work, power consumption and temperatures are reduced, which in turn allows for higher frequency scaling and performance.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.1c06801 [acs.org]

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