Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
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Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
1–8 of 8 posts
Re: Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
#2Surprised they haven’t IPO’d yet!
Re: Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
#3They claim that "the photonics core operates at the speed of light (...) boosting bandwidth by a factor of ten while reducing latency from the typical 100ns with electronics-based chips to a staggering 100 picoseconds (a 1000X improvement)". Plus a radical reduction in power consumption ...
It would be interesting to hear from anyone with insights into the realistic potential of this tech.
Re: Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
#4They claim that "the photonics core operates at the speed of light (...) boosting bandwidth by a factor of ten while reducing latency from the typical 100ns with electronics-based chips to a staggering 100 picoseconds (a 1000X improvement)". Plus a radical reduction in power consumption ... It would be interesting to hear from anyone with insights into the realistic potential of this tech.
Potential of this tech was discovered 2 decades ago: https://www.israel21c.org/new-israeli-electro-optic-processo...
Looks like it's potential wasn’t unleashed during this time.
Re: Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
#5Difficult to believe, but I sure hope it is real! It would mean a substantial leap ahead for mankind.
Re: Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
#6They claim that "the photonics core operates at the speed of light (...) boosting bandwidth by a factor of ten while reducing latency from the typical 100ns with electronics-based chips to a staggering 100 picoseconds (a 1000X improvement)". Plus a radical reduction in power consumption ... It would be interesting to hear from anyone with insights into the realistic potential of this tech.
Googeling for "photonic tensor" I found this publication:
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0001942
which seems to describe a similar technology.
The matrix-multiplication is partially done in an "analog" way, multiplication with constant coefficients can be done using programmed optical attenuation elements, and the summing stage can be done by superposition of multiple optical signals.
This works well if you can do with a low dynamic range (low precision math) and with seldomly-changing coefficients (i.e. multiplying a changing vector/matrix with a constant matrix). On the other hand you save orders of magnitude of energy per operation. Maybe for neural networks this is a favourable trade-off. The paper at the link above talks about a 4-bit precision matrix multiplication.
Re: Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
#7Could you put this interferometer array directly after a lens? Before the integration readout happening on a digital camera sensor. You wouldn't have the photon-electron-photon conversion.
At least some computation can already be done before the integration. There's already some feature highlighting happening on the retina.
I assume it's not possible, you need a laser as input source.
Re: Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data
#8They claim that "the photonics core operates at the speed of light (...) boosting bandwidth by a factor of ten while reducing latency from the typical 100ns with electronics-based chips to a staggering 100 picoseconds (a 1000X improvement)". Plus a radical reduction in power consumption ... It would be interesting to hear from anyone with insights into the realistic potential of this tech.
The problem of these approaches is that they are limited by the electronics needed to control the optics. It is all about the electronics. The numbers presented for the chip were worse than what can be accomplished with conventional digital electronics at equivalent bit depth.