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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."
This innovative new product will enable revolutionary, new applications in the fields of defense, homeland security, multimedia and communications. The exhibition being held at The World Trade Center, continues until October 15th, 2003.
The fact that...
1. its at the WTC
2. they mention defense and homeland security
3. its immensely powerful
...makes me question whether or not this is going to be available to end users.
besides the lack of a huge marketing campaign.
Anyone know anything different?
Get paid to code OSS
Optical processors have incredible potential. And if you think that's good, just wait. The combo of an optical processor with optical memory is a one-two punch.
But if you want to get the full speed out of your processor and memory, as I recall, all the buses must be optical as well.
Otherwise you're limited by silicon and PCB boards again...
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports"
Its really quite sick and disturbing that the aftermath of 9/11 has degraded to a marketing ploy.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
"the world's first commercial optical digital signal processor"
When I read the lead post, I thought it was an actual processor like on a PC motherboard... not a DSP. These aren't the same things are they? The possible applications listed on the press release seem to be entirely communications oriented. (ie. fiber optics)
Now a NAND gate using only optics (not electro-optics) would be fantastic. Maybe using some sort of wave interference to generate the logic table... and as you know you can build all of the other logic gates from a NAND!
Why does it matter how large it is, as long as it's not ridiculous? Think about how much empty space there is in your box right now, would a processor that's maybe two or three times the size of current processors REALLY be that big of a deal?
I've been wondering why the government gave up outlawing outlawing encryption. If this is just being made comercial now, then the NSA must have had similar stuff 5 or 10 years ago.
Beowulf is the running joke, but in seriousness how good is 1024 bit encryption vrs 1000 of these things.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
It think it's pretty depressing that the only applications they can think of for this technology is war.
I was almost impressed by this, until I read up on the technology on their website. It will have a pretty limited use as it only has 8-bit precision vector/matrix MAC which is where the 8 teraflops come from. This will be fine and all for just video but it isn't much of a quantum leap for anything else (besides having an optical core). I mean it has power, but there are other chips out there that do more with greater precision numbers.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
What if you take some data, do some 50000 operations on it and then store the results?
Memory is no longer a bottleneck, it all depends on what you are doing and this processor is most likely *very* specialized.
... at the Lenslet page, the unit actually has several components. The VMM (vector matrix multiplier) does 8000 MAC (matrix array calculations) but there is a VPU (vector processing unit) that comes in at 128 Giga-ops and which would be the bottleneck in the whole setup. No question this is a huge improvement BUT to put it in perspective, it is a DSP only, not a computer system (although some neural network weenies might see a way of turning this into something more than just a DSP). In any case, the bottlenecks will come from the equipment it has to operate with both onboard and off.
Still, note that it's developed with Matlab. Now surely that is the Holy Grail of research, a bitchin' language with an awesome tailored processor. Imagine the logo Matlab [Lenslet Inside].
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.