Photonics-Based Computing Device Announced, and More

takyon writes:

Optical Chip Promises 350x Speedup Over RTX 3080 in Some Algorithms

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

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