Optical Transformers
I have a personal dislike of special purpose hardware. I didn't really realize how much  I disliked the idea, until I woke up to GPUs and off-CPU processing and the complexity of dealing with this "thing" bolted onto the side of a beautiful ISA, to do "other things" -which of course is entirely normal, it's always been so, Bell and Howell discussed a wheel of life about the smarts to run a printer in mainframe days, winding up with the printer moving to its own dedicated CPU and being networked and then you repeat the wheel over the network controller.<p>I first met this with a floating-point systems co-processor on a Dec-10. It was highly problem specific, only a single DECUS tape FORTRAN compiler talked to it (IIRC) and you had this giant freezer sized box (it was lime green, unlike the blue DEC-10 livery) sat next to the CPU doing... mostly nothing. It was basically idle almost all the time. Occupying floorspace, consuming power, making the DEC-10 more complex to operate.<p>Same-same with 3DES processing cards, on-card ethernet TCP, you-name-it -these things absolutely do improve the world, but at a cost of complexity.<p>So the idea of designing optical interference/coherence/diffraction "engines" to bolt onto the side of a beautiful ISA, and winding up with something morally like a GPU which has to do complex TCAM like memory, wierd protocols on the bus, all to get what? some context specific speed up of .. text processing?<p>If this winds up down in the VLSI level on-chip, as an alternate compute element inside the ALU/ISA space, with its own bus path, and simply integrates more tightly into the ISA I'd be fine.<p>Perhaps thats where it's going.