Comment by api

I've always wondered if optical transistors and optical processors might be able to kick the crap out of conventional electronic ones even if they're fabricated at a much larger "process node" if the switching could be orders of magnitude faster.

Electronics has topped out in the gigahertz range. We keep cramming more cores and more ALU units and wider vectors onto a chip by making it smaller and we keep making it more energy efficient, but it's not getting faster in terms of linear compute and hasn't for a while. We've started hitting physical limits there.

Optics could, AFAIK, run in the terahertz range. That's thousands of gigahertz. So wouldn't that be like thousands of electronic cores, but it would accelerate all code including non-parallelizable code?

I've wondered if this might not be a bigger deal for general purpose compute than quantum computing.

Or is my understanding way off?