US startup Neurophos, based in Austin and backed by Bill Gates’ Gates Frontier fund, announced the creation of a revolutionary optical processor (OPU) — the Tulkas T100. Developers claim the chip outperforms NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 by 10x in FP4/INT4 computations while consuming similar power.

CEO Patrick Bowen explained that the chip uses a 1000 x 1000 photonic sensor matrix, roughly 15 times larger than the standard 256 x 256 in modern GPUs. Optical transistor size is reduced 10,000x, allowing a density competitive with digital CMOS solutions.

The Tulkas T100 operates at an incredible 56 GHz, far exceeding modern silicon processors. The large matrix and high frequency allow a single “optical tensor core” to rival hundreds of Nvidia cores.

Mass production is expected no earlier than 2028, as scaling, memory, and vector computation challenges remain.