A superfast computing processor that uses light, not electrons, to perform calculations has gone on sale for the first time. Lenslet, the Israeli company that developed the processor, say its light speed calculations deliver the power of a supercomputer in a single device.
The device is called Enlight and can perform 8000 billion arithmetic operations per second, about 1000 times faster than a standard processor. Previously this type of processor was only available to highly financed government laboratories.
EnLight will be useful across a broad range of applications, from military projects to compressing high definition video images. Enlight is not a general purpose processor like a Pentium. Instead, each processor will be custom-built to perform a specific set of tasks, and will not be programmable.
Much research has been done to try to exploit the much faster speed at which light travels compared to electronic signals, but most commercial work in this area has focused mainly on optical interfaces. These devices allow fibre optic and related systems to communicate with traditional electronic systems.
Strictly speaking, EnLight is a hybrid device, housing both electronic and optical circuits, but it is the optical processing that make it so fast. It allows you to do a massive level of operations in parallel.
The processing in the Enlight device is carried out using a process called vector matrix-multiplication, which allows calculations to be performed on 256 optical inputs.
The beams from 256 lasers are added or multiplied together when shone on a matrix device called a spatial light modulator. The outputs are then read by an array of light detectors.
Lenslet would not put a precise price on how much an EnLight processor would cost, because each will be made to order.
