The whole space of analogue computing (circuits) did get a big boost in recent years (people had been doing it for years, but it never amounted to anything), la

The whole space of analogue computing (circuits) did get a big boost in recent years (people had been doing it for years, but it never amounted to anything), largely because of the requirements of deep learning, which is essentially large matrix multiplications. I guess many of the recent ML accelerators fall under this category in some way. There's also been quite a bit of work on using optics (mainly integrated optics) for these tasks, but it's still very open if that will amount to anything. All that said, I really would be hesitant to call this computing in the traditional sense, it's more like an accelerator card if anything.