Readers care, this requires a nice amount of physics knowledge to really understand. Not too advanced but still, physics.
Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#12It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling.
You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo?
If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#13When I first learned about computer science at the age of 11 or so (and in 1982 or so) the first page of the text book put digital and analogue computers on what seemed to be an equal footing. And then proceeded to ignore the latter for the rest of the book. Apart from a few notable exceptions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine ) I've often wondered about analogue computing.
At the end of my undergrad, I remember a UW professor being poached by intel to work on analogue computing research project, the chair of the department at the time said that it was an opportunity that might not ever happen again and he had to take. I don’t think it went anywhere (since I never heard of intel coming out with a product), but I at least knew there was an attempt.
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#14It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling. You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo? If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.
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Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#15It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling. You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo? If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.
What they are trying to achieve is to demonstrate that the coupling approach works in a simulated physics environment (O(n^2) as you point out) so that they can then build CMOS circuits that create actual oscillators and then let the laws of physics do the computation. This is a very bold vision!
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#16It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling. You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo? If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.
What they are trying to achieve is to demonstrate that the coupling approach works in a simulated physics environment (O(n^2) as you point out) so that they can then build CMOS circuits that create actual oscillators and then let the laws of physics do the computation. This is a very bold vision!
And anyone who has done an introductory course in VLSI design would know that capacitance (coupling) is something you usually want to get rid of. However, all kinds of amazing analog circuits have been developed over the decades that exploit coupling effects. So, their idea is not outlandish at all.
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#17This kind of reminds me of DCT in lossy image compression, but in reverse.
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#18It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling. You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo? If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.
Yes I too am perplexed. I'm into audio synthesis so I feel I have somewhat better-than-average knowledge of oscillators, from the component or elementary mathematical level (depending on whether they're analog or digital) to complex interactions for fun and profit (frequency, phase, ring modulation).
These are cool results but I was disappointed not to find any discussion of where oscillator array technology stands today what the manufacturing challenges/opportunities might be. It seems like it would be prohibitively expensive for anything beyond minimal networks of a few hundred nodes that could be used in sensors. Even if you have perfectly consistent oscillators that synchronize to each other within very fine tolerances, wiring them up to each other is still a massive headache.
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#19This method is cool and the post explains it well. It would, however, be good to get more detail on the energy efficiency they flag as their motivation: is this model actually more energy efficient than the comparators they highlight?
It seems like total parameter count is more or less on par with conventional approaches so any gains won't be from there.
We can implement coupled oscillators in hardware but are the couplings and frequencies programmable? If they're being streamed in I guess you'd still have a memory bandwidth bottleneck and associated energy usage. If not then the fair comparison is to a conventional model hardcoded in an ASIC which AFAIU is actually quite energy efficient.
Re: Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
#20It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling. You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo? If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.
What they are trying to achieve is to demonstrate that the coupling approach works in a simulated physics environment (O(n^2) as you point out) so that they can then build CMOS circuits that create actual oscillators and then let the laws of physics do the computation. This is a very bold vision!
Doesn't that require quadratically-many wires to connect all the processing units?