A superfast computing processor that uses light, not electrons, to perform calculations has gone on sale for the first time. Lenslet, the Israeli company that developed the processor, say its light speed calculations deliver the power of a supercomputer in a single device reports New Scientist. The device is called Enlight and can perform 8000 billion arithmetic operations per second, about 1000 times faster than a standard processor. Previously this type of processor was only available to highly financed government laboratories, says Lenslet's founder, Aviram Sariel. He believes EnLight will be useful across a broad range of applications, from military projects to compressing high definition video images. Sariel acknowledges that Enlight "is not a general purpose processor like a Pentium". Instead, each processor will be custom-built to perform a specific set of tasks, and will not be programmable. Much research has been done to try to exploit the much faster speed at which light travels compared to electronic signals, but most commercial work in this area has focused mainly on optical interfaces. These devices allow fibre optic and related systems to communicate with traditional electronic systems. More here.