Data has been sent across wide-area networks as light pulses for decades, but optical (or photonic) computing has been slow to meet the challenges of moving data in the form of light at the processor level: photons have proved profoundly trickier to traffic than electrons. And while conventional data processing continued to get faster year-after-year, there seemed scant incentive for technologists to crack the optical conundrum.
Nowadays, however, it’s roundly acknowledged that compute performance gains with conventional processor architectures have arrived at an impasse. Worse, physical limits on the number of cores that can be crammed onto a conventional IC are being reached just as advanced applications in AI and quantum need more – much more – compute power for them to pay their way.
It’s possible, of course, to bend Moore’s Law to an extent with parallel processing, which divides up and runs computational tasks on multiples of microprocessors simultaneously...