For half a century, computing has been chained to silicon. Chips packed with billions of transistors have carried us from room-sized mainframes to smartphones in our pockets, but Moore’s Law is running out of runway. The next frontier may not be smaller circuits at all—but light itself.
At Microsoft’s Cambridge Research Lab in the U.K., scientists have built a prototype analog optical computer (AOC) that doesn’t rely on electrons but beams of light to perform computations. This radical shift could accelerate artificial intelligence, financial modeling, and medical diagnostics by as much as 100 times, while consuming just a fraction of the energy required by today’s processors.
Continue reading… “The Dawn of Light-Powered Computing: Microsoft’s Optical Leap Beyond Silicon”