[nazgul17]

Asking from a position of total ignorance. The energy savings mean you can increase clock speeds, right? Assuming a big enough jump, won't that relieve a CPU from the need to have most specialised instruction sets and potentially also that many cores? In that case, wouldn't it be acceptable that transistors grow (back) in size?

[Dylan16807]

Energy savings on what basis?

If your gate gets 50x50x50 times bigger, you need some pretty extreme savings per area/volume of circuit if you want to reduce the per-gate usage. Can they save that much?

[Nevermark]

I would think yes. Which would be something. Huge rooms of enormous optical computers running lightening fast on low power would have a kind of retro future feel.

Light would reduce the time cost of distance, and increase the density of connections (optical signals can pass through each other) so this could actually work.