Chinese researchers have developed the first highly parallel optical computing integrated chip, named “Meteor-1”, setting a milestone for using light to perform an enormous number of operations at the same time. The advance promises hardware acceleration for AI and data centers struggling with soaring computational demands. The chip achieves a theoretical peak computing power of 2,560 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at 50GHz optical frequency – performance comparable to Nvidia’s advanced GPUs. Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 5090 graphic card peaks at 3,352 TOPS while its previous flagship RTX 4090 only reached 1,321 TOPS. In the past, optical chips remained mostly in laboratory settings, and could not come close to commercial flagship GPUs in real-life tasks. Nvidia’s 4090 and 5090 are effectively banned for sale to China because of U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and AI chips that could aid Beijing in advancing its military capabilities.
As traditional electronic chips hit fundamental physical limits – from heat build-up, quantum effects and unsustainable power consumption – optical computing emerges as a critical future direction. Its inherent advantages, such as ultra-high speed, broad bandwidth, low power and minimal latency, position it to overcome these barriers. Progress in optical computing has long focused on two key challenges: scaling up the matrix size and increasing optical frequency. Existing top models – exemplified by prototypes from TSMC and the California Institute of Technology (CAL) – are pushing against both engineering and physical limits. Consequently, a third way – expanding computational parallelism, or the ability of chips to multitask – has become the necessary path forward.
In a paper published on June 17 in eLight journal, Xie Peng and Han Xilin of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) and Hu Guangwei of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, detailed a novel optical computing system that could hold more than 100 frequency channels in a single photonic chip.
“This achievement enables a more than 100-fold increase in optical computability through ultra-high parallelism without scaling up the chip size, offering a novel technological pathway for future optical computers,” they said in the paper. “This breakthrough promises to elevate optical computing to a cost-performance level competitive with electronic chips.” The integrated Meteor-1 system features fully self-developed architecture, including a light source chip, optical interaction chip, optical computing chip and a modulation matrix driver board. Leveraging this system, the team set a world recording running more than 100 tasks at the same time on the system. Operating at 50GHz, the single chip delivers theoretical peak computing power of more than 2560 TOPS, the South China Morning Post reports.
