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New Optical Chip Claims 8 Trillion Operations/sec.
Richard Finney writes "Lenslet is announcing
the 'World's First Commercial Optical Processor.'. Reuters has the story here. The Inquirer has a cool graphic here on it. The processor is specified to run at a speed of 8 Tera (8,000 Giga) operations per second, one thousand times faster than any known DSP. When Lenslet releases its Enlight processor in a matter of weeks, a unit using the technology will be 1.7 centimetres high and measure 15 by 15 centimetres."
There's a nice picture of the processor here
Israeli Processor Computes at Speed of Light
Wed October 29, 2003 05:03 AM ET
By Tova Cohen
HERZLIYA, Israel (Reuters) - An Israeli start-up has developed a processor that uses optics instead of silicon, enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.
Lenslet said its processor will enable new capabilities in homeland security and military, multimedia and communications applications.
"Optical processing is a strategic competitive advantage for nations and companies," said Avner Halperin, vice president for business development at Lenslet.
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."
An optical processor is a digital signal processor (DSP) with an optical accelerator attached to it that enables it to perform functions at very high speeds.
"It is an acceleration of 20 years in the development of digital hardware," Lenslet founder and Chief Executive Officer Aviram Sariel told Reuters.
The processor performs 8 trillion operations per second, equivalent to a super-computer and 1,000 times faster than standard processors, with 256 lasers performing computations at light speed.
It is geared toward such applications as high resolution radar, electronic warfare, luggage screening at airports, video compression, weather forecasting and cellular base stations.
Lenslet said its Enlight processor, unveiled at the MILCOM exhibition in Boston this month, is the first commercially available optical DSP.
"Optics is the future of every information device," said Sariel.
Jim Tully, vice president and chief of research for semiconductors and emerging technologies at Gartner Inc, said most companies working with optics focus on switching optical signals for telecommunications rather than processing information optically.
"I'm not aware of any company that has taken it to the extent of processing optically," he said.
Lenslet has raised $27.5 million so far from such investors as Goldman Sachs, Walden VC, Germany's Star Ventures and Chicago-based JK&B Capital.
PALM PILOT SIZE
The company's prototype is fairly large and bulky but when Lenslet begins to supply the processor in a few months it will be shrunk to 15 x 15 cm with a height of 1.7 cm, roughly the size of a Palm Pilot.
"In five years we plan to shrink it to a single chip," project manager Asaf Schlezinger said.
Tully said one issue is whether this technology can be produced in volume the way silicon chips are made.
"Because semiconductor manufacturing technology is well developed, you can produce millions at quite low cost," said Tully, who is not familiar with Enlight.
Lenslet said its processor will be competitive in price with a multi DSP board.
Sariel is negotiating joint projects with companies and/or government agencies in the United States, Europe and Japan to produce the processor for specific applications. It already has projects signed with Israel's Defense Ministry.
"We don't rule out licensing our technology to others," Sariel said. "We are looking at a virtual production line where production is done by others and we provide testing equipment."
Tully said semiconductor companies are working on technology that would use optical channels inside a chip to allow very high speed communication from one part of a chip to another.
"It's conceivable this technology could become mainstream inside chips in 10 years time," Tully said.
(C) Copyright Reuters 2003. All rights reserved. Any copying, re-publication or re-distribution of Reuters content or of any content used on this site, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without prior written consent of Reuters.
I'm guessing that the optical chip is likely just a DSP due to the inability of current optical technology to do branching, conditions, looping, etc. It probably cannot be used as a general purpose CPU. It would do some straight-through processing where all inputs have outputs. That's why they mentioned multimedia applications and not instense number crunching simulations.
Exactly what operations were performed?
The "vector matrix" multiply is attractive to a lot of people.
But I doubt this includes fetching data, storing results in memory. And the operations might be more like one-bit XOR's than general Level 3 BLAS.
Need more information...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
here is a mirror of that pic, cuz that site is already slashdotted by now.
g
http://www.stuwo.net/temp/i_products_enlight.jp
http://www.stuwo.net/temp/i_products_enlight.jpg
Generally speaking a DSP is just like any other processor but optimized for certain types of calculations, like fourier transforms and matrix multiplications.
This thing probably has some very specialized optical processing elements that can do thousands of "ops" in parallell if your code can utilize it fully.
Remember it's Tera-operations per second, not tera-instructions.
Quantitive leaps like this aren't too significant as regards encryption, and it's certainly nowhere near "infinite processing power".
Assuming this new optical chip is 1000 time faster than existing chips, that would mean I need to add a whole 10 bits to my key to make a brute force attack as hard as it is now. If you make a chip one million times faster, I'll just add another 10 bits.
and of course this at instance was not likely to have been the first since this was something that was textbook knowledge at that time--fourier processing of signals could be done optically. his was just a particularly advance version, doing more advanced matrix multiples in 2-D.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's a DSP, not a CPU.
Stream comes in one end, chip does some magical shit to it, stream comes out the other end..
Like your mp3 player - raw data goes in one end of the DSP, gets decoded into audio, then sent off to the D/A converter for your listening pleasure.
So this can handle larger/faster streams and do more to them.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I studied this subject in depth and happen to know 6 six physics professors who agree with me on the subject. And I don't agree with a thing you've said.
To do anything at all with light, you need a material in with light beams can interact.
Light will interact in almost any medium. Many kinds of optical gates have already been created.
In this material, the speed at which electrons can change energy levels determine the speed.
I'm not even sure what you are talking about here. There are no signal carrying electrons in an optical fiber - that's the point. And if you meant photons instead of electrons, then the photons aren't changing energy levels. If you look back through your physics book, that would corrospond to changing color, and has nothing to do with optical computing. It is the absence or presence of light that determines the on or off state. Not the voltage, as in a regular processor.
In fact: the rise and fall time are determined by how fast you can (electronically) switch the light source on or off.
If you are using an isolated optical gate with electronic converters surrounding it yes. But that would be senseless and no one does it. Everyhing inside an opticl processor is connected by light signals. Each optical gate interacts with other optical gates optically. And as time goes on, the memory and bus of these systems will also become optical. Already, there are many physical processes that do not need any optical-electronic conversion : especially cpu bound operations that fit into the cache.
I don't beleive you have accurately grasped the concept of optical computing. If you have questions, please ask them. But don't assert your opinion as fact.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I'm not quite sure you understand what this processor is, and how it works. This is *NOT* like a Pentium with a faster clockspeed. This is a signal processing chip which, rather than really executing code, uses a series of optical filters to do massively expensive mathematical operations. This has the following set of properties:
The original poster was right, this IS the future, at least for now
Cheers,
Justin
Disclaimer: I'm one semester away from my bachelors in Physics
I think the answer to that is the wonderfully quantum "It depends".
Option 1 - Digital Optical - simply measures whether the optical source is on or off
Option 2 - Analog Optical - measures whether the optical source is on or off, and also measures the intensity, say to 50 distinct levels.
Option 3 - Pretty Optical - as well as on, off and intensity, also measures emitted colour as an extra set of data bits.
I've no idea if Option 3 is practical/practicable, but all three sound pretty feasible, to say the least.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Seriously though, basically this chip can do very quickly what the SETI@Home software does on PCs. Fast fourier transforms and the like... Think about completing a calculation unit every 30 seconds instead of 8 hours and 40 minutes. That is the ball park. I wonder if the precision will be the same.
Just to make myself clear:
- Light will interact in almost any medium. Many kinds of optical gates have already been created.
Yes, light will interact; badly. Many kinds of _fully_ optical gates have been prototyped and proposed. Few are available commercially
- There are no signal carrying electrons in an optical fiber.
Duh, no - but weren't we talking about optical gates; two beams interacting? How do they interact then, if not through changing the electron populations in the material ?
- Already, there are many physical processes that do not need any optical-electronic conversion
Read my previous remark again: what is then the physical origin of the switching on/off in your proposed gates in the fully optical processor ?
And to bounce back your initial snide remark: I too have studied this subject in depth (a M.Sc on the subject of optical computing and a PhD on the subject of VCSELs) and happen to know at least six physics professors who agree with me on the subject. And I don't agree with your tone, but am always interested in a stimulating discussing about points of view.
Hem Hem. M.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
Option 1: Digital doesn't mean 0 or 1. Or on or off. That's be binary. Digital just says "in steps, not continuous". At least that's what most dictionaries say.
Option 2: According to above mentioned definition that's still be digital - as long as the "50 distinct levels" are here. If measures the intensity continuously that'd be analog.
Correct me if I am completely wrong but that's what most of the dictionaries and encyclopedias I used say..
HAH!!! I found the post I lost in my browser cache!!! Now you can read and enjoy it.
Sorry if I came off snide. I didn't mean too. I took your comment to be snide and responded a little harshly. I will be much more civil.
Here's a better and longer explanation of what I said before.
With the present theory of computing (electronic and optical) you have a clock that drives the processor. Actions that take place such as moves, adds, rotates, and multiplies all take place because of an enabling clock pulse. There are bits that will be set on or off that are read and written at the clock pulse. For any digital computer, there must be on and off thresholds - above a certain threshold is on, and below a certain threshold is off - in between is not used and possibly an error.
With your degree, I'm sure you know all this.
Once a bit is set, that is a voltage applied or a light turned on, there is a certain amount of wait time until that signal propogates and can be read. The slope of the voltage vs time plot is rather shallow compared to a light intensity vs time plot. So in order to be reasonably sure that all bits your enabled have reached the threshold will take longer for an electronic signal than for an optical signal. This is why overclockers often increase the voltage on their cpu's, to decrease the time it takes for the signal to reach the threshold value. However, since the intensity of light increases much faster (the packet is tigher) the clock can be set at a MUCH faster rate and still maintain good assurance that all signals have reached their threshold value.
Hopefully this better explains what I said before. You can only imagine if I had tried to type that all into my original post!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
They used to use regular electronic circuits to solve differential equations and similar problems too. They didn't get an exact solution, but they got a usable value. I think that's what you're talking about here.
:)
You're talking about old analog electronic computers... yeah those weren't very precise (one of the reasons they are no longer used).
What I'm talking about is a little different. Those electronic ciruits would solve differential equations in the time domain (requiring a bit of time to compute) whereas these optical processors process information in the frequency domain (almost instantly, the bottlneck is as you say how fast they can moduate the light from an electronic signal).
Frequency domain computing is fundamentally different from the time domain computing in that in time domain analog computers, tiny errors accumulate very rapidly. For instance, an operational amplifier that is used to perform an integration will have a small bias current which will slowly charge the integrating capactor(s), requiring the integration to be rezeroed every so often (at least every few seconds, if not many times a second). In frequency domain computation, the error is not accumulative like that. There is error, and it does add up, but its pretty much orthogonal (the error is spread throughout the frequency space, rather than adding up towards the end of the time space in a time domain computer).
A really great article I found (this is the one I originally read back in 2001) is here. Anyone interested in the more technical side of the processor should read it. It explains why the processing is so fast (because it's essentially parallel rather than serial, along with being based on photons rather than electrons).
That's where I got most of my information from, along with my optics and mathematical physics classes
Cheers,
Justin
Disclaimer: I'm still a semester away from my BS in physics
I'm not saying that I think this thing is dumb, I just don't see how they can call this a commercial application. Guiding missles isn't something I shop for at Walmart. It's surely a useful research tool (like I previously mentioned) and apparently useful for military applications, but I'm still left wondering what type of commercial application this thing would serve. If you'd like to read a great article that explains this, check out: EE Times Story from 2001.
It mentions this is very useful for "fast Fourier transforms/inverse fast Fourier transforms (FFTs)/(IFFTs), discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete Fourier transform (DFT), compression, vector-matrix multiplication, equalization and correlation". ALl of these are very useful for processing communications signals such as in cell phones or high-quality recievers (HDTV in rural areas?).
It also mentions that the optical light is modulated at 10 GhZ frame rate (but remember, this is quite parallel processing) and no ordinary computer we have today could possibly crunch 10 billion FFTs in a second. So the terrahertz number is mostly them just stacking it against existing computers.
Cheers,
Justin
You can build both digital and analog computers from analog components. Indeed, aside from "ideal switches", I'd argue that most circuit components are analog. The poster to which you responded is correct -- a system built around discrete levels selected from a continuous domain is considered digital. A system built around continuous levels is considered analog.
So, if you build a computer around 4-level signaling, it'd still be digital. Each signal corresponds to a "digit," likely valued 0 thru 3. If you built a differential-equation analyser out of op-amps, resistors, capacitors and inductors to represent the derivatives/integrals in your system of equations, and operated it within the linear region of the op-amps, you'd have an analog computer. Those aren't very popular anymore, nor have they been for some time.
The options you suggested a couple posts up are all variants of digital signaling. The first one is binary signaling. The second one is discrete amplitude modulation. The third one is multi-frequency discrete amplitude modulation.
The real question is, can you build large numbers of sufficiently small gates for a given signaling method? Additionally, do those gates aggregate into computing structures we know how to use effectively?
Related side topic: 3-valued logic (ternary computing) likely won't take off until its proponents have good answers for both questions. Something tells me the circuits and the gates are the smaller of the two problems. The change in programming paradigm is too big.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Whats really sad is that you automaticly assume that 'having safer airports' refers to terrorism, as if that is the only thing that makes airports dangerous.
The mainframe world has had optical interconnects for some time now; I saw Amdahl machines so arranged around 5 years ago or so.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton