Look inside a science fiction computer, and you’ll probably see tubes and cubes that emit light. Of course, it’s for effect, but the truth is, people do think light computing may be the final frontier of classical computing power. Engineers at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are […]
Although computers are overwhelmingly digital today, there’s a good point to be made that analog computers are the more efficient approach for specific applications. The authors behind a recent paper in Nature are arguing that inference – essential for LLMs – can be done significantly more efficiently using an analog optical computer (AOC). As the authors […]
We’ve all come to terms with a neural network doing jobs such as handwriting recognition. The basics have been in place for years and the recent increase in computing power and parallel processing has made it a very practical technology. However, at the core level it is still a digital computer moving bits around just […]