This is what gets my juices going: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1619
All-optical Reservoir Computing
If efficiency is vastly improved, we can stack the layers and increase frequency by quite a bit. Even if the processor becomes a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube, it's okay as a proof of concept.
It's an interesting approach to overcome the inherient limitations of electron based circuits.
Re:Light-based computers in development
by TTPrograms on Thursday May 21, 2015 @10:23AM
(#9582893)
Again, right now 1 in 100 photons will interact with an optical switch. This effect multiplies with each level of transistors. This means you have to "run" your circuit potentially something like 10^100 times to get all of the transistors in your path to work on the same photon.
That's pretty rough.
There's also scaling issues - we have 20nm electrical switches, which is almost 50 times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so you either need to go to deep UV or confine light to area much smaller than the free-space wavelength, which presents its own challenges.
My personal interest in optical computing is mainly in building optical quantum computers, in which case the cost/size/power of solving these challenges could be well worth it due to the scaling advantages of multi-qubit entanglement. Classical optical computing does not really seem that worth it if we need to build computer chips that are 1000 times bigger and run each operation on average 10^8 times to get a valid result, although the clock speed and power benefits would be nice.