MIT spinout Lightmatter presented its optical compute chip at Hot Chips 32, promising orders of magnitude improvements in latency and power consumption...
www.eetasia.com, Aug. 26, 2020 –
Lightmatter, the MIT spinout developing optical compute processors for AI acceleration, presented a test chip at Hot Chips 32 this week. Using techniques from silicon photonics and MEMS, the processor performs matrix vector multiplication at the speed of light (in silicon), powered by a milliwatt laser light source. Computation is orders of magnitude faster than transistor-based chips, including the latest GPUs, and it uses very little power.
Lightmatter's intention is to prove that its approach to processor design is solid by showing off this test chip. The company is one of the first to present a working optical compute (silicon photonics) chip tailored for AI inference workloads.
Lightmatter will have its first commercial product available in autumn 2021, a PCIe card with optical compute chip based on a successor to this demonstrator. It is designed for data center AI inference workloads.