[boznz]

Weirdly complex to read yet light on key technical details. My TLDR (as an old clueless electronics engineer) was the compute part is photonic/analog, lasers and waveguides, yet we still require 50 billion transistors performing the (I guess non-compute) parts such as ADC, I/O, memory etc. The bottom line is 65 TOPS for <80W - The processing (optical) part consuming 1.65W and the 'helper electronics' consuming the rest so scaling the (optical) processing should not have the thermal bottlenecks of a solely transistor based processor. Also parallelism of the optical part though using different wavelengths of light as threads may be possible. Nothing about problems, costs, or can the helper electronics eventually use photonics.

I remember a TV Program in the UK from the 70's (tomorrows world I think) that talked about this so I am guessing silicon was just more cost effective until now. Still taking it at face value I would say it is quite an exciting technology.

[sandeep1998]

Insightful Note. thank you.