Eighty years ago, Penn researchers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly launched the age of electronic computing by harnessing electrons to solve complex numerical problems with ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer. Today, that same architecture still underlies general computing, but electrons are beginning to show their limits. Because they carry a charge, they lose energy as heat, encounter resistance as they move through materials, and become harder to manage as chips incorporate more transistors and handle larger volumes of data.
  • Alexander@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    4 days ago

    What a shitty article. Not mentioning stupid ai hype, it’s like there was no half century (at least) of work on purely photonic computations. And no explanation of what’s new about this work, I remember threshold switches in amplifying media 2d Si photonic crystals from 2008 or so, I date it easily as it was on a conference in Crimea well before occupation.