What's some other ways a processor could be made? Need this for my novel

Steam punk would probably be coal and steam or gravity and water because water current has a fairly simple analogy to electrical current.
youtube.com/watch?v=6qP9HfUOCN4

From what another user said in a thread a while back is that those processors are 7 generations ahead.

Read this book:
ac.aua.am/Arm/Public/2017-Spring-Computer-Organization/Textbooks/ComputerOrganizationAndDesign5thEdition2014.pdf

>7 generations ahead
what does that even mean? for what applications?

I'm not sure, assuming he meant like 20 years per gen or something.

Not really. It's quite energy-efficient but it doesn't even really count as a processor.

Using light instead of electricity.

This sounds cool as fuck. Can it be done?

Hell yeah
>Robust
>No back EMF
>Loud and manly compressors

But can it run Crysis

try looking into reversible computing.
its a theoretical processor architecture where instead of the destructive write operations of modern computers and their high heat generation.
data is stored as packets of electrical charge in logic gates made of inductors and capacitors whose operations can be entirely reversed.
one of the chief differences between reversible computing and modern computing is that reversible computing uses vastly lower amounts of power.

with silicon having hit the power wall, light based, reversible, carbon or some other thing will eventually need to be developed in order to meaningfully increase single core performance

Babbage machine

It sounds idiotic as fuck

>thinking TPU is in any way similar to CPU
TPUs are very fast but very low precision and with a very limited instruction set because their use case is entirely different: they are used for processing a fuck ton of linear algebra for neural networks. They will not replace CPUs just like GPUs didn't - they can only be used to give a massive boost in certain applications, but aren't general-purpose. Again, just like GPUs.

If you add enough relays.

what TPUs good for then?

>can it be done
It already has been, for several decades. It's more than computers but general data transfer as well. What do you think is used widely in internet infrastructure? It can and has been applied to the actual electronics too. I think the main challenge is materials and designs, for focusing and directing light. No point in powering it with some electricity-powered lasers as you defeat the purpose.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computing

dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Computing

Collect millions of humans from around the fringes of the galaxy and then compress them into an AI somehow.

A bored and dedicated neet with a soldering iron and a truckload of transistors

Tons and tons of low precision processing - precisely what is needed in neural networks. That's what Google specifically builds them for

Useful for you, OP?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing

Is it possible to build a chemical reaction based computer?

Not for you because the process requires gf

Finally I will be able to fuck my computer

The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage.[2][3] It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a mechanical computer.[4] The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.[5][6] In other words, the logical structure of the Analytical Engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era.[3]

so how does TPU compare with shit like TrueNorth and Nervana?

diamonds

Eric Drexler Nanosystems describes a mechanical computer made using nanotech ~1giga-op/sec in a tiny volume with very low power.

I don't know these two. TPU is an acronym (Tensor Processing Unit), just like CPU is a Central Processing Unit. Perhaps these two are brand names for certain types of TPUs? (Just like NVidya GTX is a brand of GPUs)

No they are neuromorphic architectures

>What type of a processor would an advanced alien species use?
They wouldn't even need processors because they'd just use their super advanced alien brains and telekinesis

>What would a steampunk society use?
Processors powered by steam, duh

Some kind of advanced Williams-Kilburn tubes. The technology was abandoned in favor of microprocessors, but you could imagine an alternate timeline in which these crude devices had been increasingly refined using ultraprecise light arrays at an extremely small scale.

That's crazy

Oh, what's that?

I don't have much insight into them beyond what you can find online, but in general I guess they are like neural networks implemented in hardware

Look up "fluidic logic"
nptel.ac.in/courses/112105046/m7L27.pdf
They have the advantage that you can _see_ the logic gates operating. Helps you understand what's happening. They're like little plastic blocks you can snap together.
Once upon a time the military was interested in them because they're immune to radiation and, to a great extent, vibration. Finally abandoned when electronics became millions and billions of times faster and incredibly smaller. They'd work well in a steampunk world because the output can actually do mechanical work.

I took a grad course in the subject once. The final problem was to design a system which would count cylinders rolling past a sensor (also fluidic), shunt them into alternating groups of 8 and 12, wrap them, and stamp "Budweiser" on the side!

CRYSTALS

quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/experience

Replace electrons with photons (very little energy wasted in the form of heat; with special optical switching elements, each set of elements can operate on many frequencies of light simultaneously, thus only one cpu core is needed, but effectively you can have thousands of virtual cores runnimg simultaneously on the same physical core).

Replace photolithographic traces in the semiconductor material with optical waveguides.

Replace HDDs / SSDs with holographic data storage media (individual cells in the medium are can be made transparent or opaque to certain frequencies of light, allowing tremendous improvements in storage density).