It's just as if he had the brilliant idea to do photonics as an outcast even though there is already a 6" wafer semi-production level fablab being built for it in The Netherlands. There is even a version of TinyTapeout for Photonics.
Finally! This paves the way towards practical BrainF*** execution.
This comes up every couple of years, but it hasn't seem to have made any advances since the first time I've seen this.
The channel's other uploads may be giving us a glimpse into this project's future.
I didn’t read but I’d also like to point out photonics are 1000x larger than leading edge electronics with minimal path to scaling smaller. I don’t see a free lunch
This has been tried by Cray like 15 years ago and the university of Colorado 11 years ago; there were also other initiatives, all failed.
I'm not excluding that now we have more budget/time/AI to make it work (if it can), I'd just say exercise caution reading this (very AI slop) article (and anything that looks too good to be true)
interesting that it is still 2 bit
akhetonics-photonic-computing 1000x-faster-cpus, in mice
If you're looking for the limits of this approach: it's about 1000x faster than electric BUT the individual components have to be way larger (and can't be shrinked down)
... which hopefully means a LOT of fabs will be able to produce these (because a 2nm node makes no sense for this)
It also means this will be incredible for radio chips, interconnects, that sort of thing and will do exactly nothing for the first 20 years for cpu's, never mind gpus.
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So they have some kind of nonlinear material that can make light modulate other light, that they managed to get working at teraherz frequencies?
Sounds incredible, as in: can't believe it.
By the way, isn't Nvidia researching this?