Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He\u2019s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he\u2019s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-12/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Jowi Morales Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
bit_user Huh. It seems the only part of this chip that's optical is just the tensor core. Everything else is conventional digital logic. I think they need to find a proper optical equivalent to SRAM, before we might be able to see a true optical CPU. Reply
alrighty_then Optical, let's go! Looks like some excellent innovation brewing. Reply
QuarterSwede bit_user said: Huh. It seems the only part of this chip that's optical is just the tensor core. Everything else is conventional digital logic. I think they need to find a proper optical equivalent to SRAM, before we might be able to see a true optical CPU. Great point. It seems to be the future since this can be made with existing fabs so I’m sure memory will be tackled next. Not sure chip design and memory design see the same scaling but I’m sure using optical for memory design will lead to much smaller parts as well. 10000x smaller? That’s a LOT of memory. And not sure why the article writer decided to leave what photonics is till the end of the article. That would have been helpful to know up front for those of us that don’t live in this world. Reply
bit_user QuarterSwede said: I’m sure memory will be tackled next. It's easy to say, but I'm not sure actually creating a purely optical memory is even a solved problem. QuarterSwede said: 10000x smaller? That’s a LOT of memory. The article was talking about how they managed to shrink an optical transistor that was previously 2 milli meters. That's where they got the 10k scale factor. Conventional SRAM cells are currently somewhere in the ballpark of 40 nano meters (source: https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/sram-cell-scaling.12722/ ). So, the point of purely optical memory would be to support building purely optical CPUs, not necessarily improving density over conventional SRAM. Reply
KraakBal How do you make a transistor a few atoms big, 10000x smaller? Why does everyone keep lying? Reply
bit_user KraakBal said: How do you make a transistor a few atoms big, 10000x smaller? The article says the size reduction is relative to the 2 millimeter size that optical transistors were, before now. KraakBal said: Why does everyone keep lying? Why does everyone keep thinking they're comparing to electronic transistors? If you see a surprising headline, read the article! Second paragraph: The article said: the company was able to make its optical transistor around 10,000 times smaller than what’s currently available. “The equivalent of the optical transistor that you get from Silicon Photonics factories today is massive. It’s like 2 mm long,” Bowen added Reply
abufrejoval But can it run Cobol? It sounds great until you realize that it's little better than quantum computing, only able to accelerate some niche problems, many of them around AI, which isn't designed to empower consumers, but to control them. Reply
bit_user abufrejoval said: But can it run Cobol? Well, the chip has a lot of digital electronics to feed the tensor core. So, perhaps. abufrejoval said: It sounds great until you realize that it's little better than quantum computing, only able to accelerate some niche problems, many of them around AI, It's main feature is the optical tensor core. I don't know what effective precision that runs at, but it seems to happen in the analog domain. So, if you had a problem where you needed lots of fast matrix multiplies of limited accuracy, then it should do the trick. These days, most problems fitting that mold are neural network inferencing. I could imagine using it for other signal processing use cases, but the limited precision would probably restrict it to image/video processing. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/bill-gates-backed-silicon-photonics-startup-develops-optical-transistors-10-000x-smaller-than-current-tech-optical-chip-can-process-1-000-x-1-000-multiplication-matrices#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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