[bigbluedots]

Please elaborate?

[dvh]

Current electron based computers are 10s of nanometers per transistor. Optical equivalent of transistor cannot be smaller than 1um. Equivalent optical CPU to your smartphone would be the size of several football fields.

[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?

[simne]

> Optical equivalent of transistor cannot be smaller than 1um

For classics optics. Exists superlens optics, which using metamaterials and monochromatic light source, and could "see" artifacts of size much less then wave length.

[throwaway69123]

While this is true doesn’t ignore the difference in clock rate capacity ? If the photonic cpu can run 10,000x the clock rate without the extreme heat build up that would melt the smartphone

[skykooler]

Isn't part of the point that you don't need as many transistor equivalents because you can run them thousands of times faster?