
Lightmatter's Mars SoC Bends Light to Process Data - rbanffy
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lightmatter-mars-soc-bends-light-to-process-data-silicon-photonics
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stareatgoats
They 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.

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dvdkhlng
Googeling for "photonic tensor" I found this publication:

[https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0001942](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.

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Gravityloss
Could 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.

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ganzuul
Difficult to believe, but I sure hope it is real! It would mean a substantial
leap ahead for mankind.

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person_of_color
Surprised they haven’t IPO’d yet!

