The Tulkas T100 operates at 56GHz, far exceeding previous CPU and GPU clock rates.

Austin-based startup Neurophos has revealed it is hard at work developing an optical processing unit called the Tulkas T100 which promises huge leaps forward in compute.

Funded by Bill Gates’ Gates Frontier Fund, the company claims the chip can deliver 470petaFLOPS of FP4 and INT4 compute while consuming between 1 and 2kW under load.

Its optical tensor core measures approximately 1,000 x 1,000, which is about 15 times larger than the standard 256 x 256 matrices used in current AI GPUs.