[extropy-chat] NEWS: optical processors

Alfio Puglisi puglisi at arcetri.astro.it
Wed Oct 29 18:12:19 UTC 2003


Optical processors are finally making some steps out of the labs and
commercial applications are expected in a short time frame. An Israeli
startup has a 8,000 Gflop/sec prototype:

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011008S0024

What's interesting to me is that, according to the article, optical
processors are inherently high-level, i.e. instead of gaining speed with
RISC-like operation, you implement high-level functions directly in
hardware (FFTs, pattern match, etc). Kinda like Mathlab with 1-clock
functions.
On the other hand, I could make thousands of matrix mult. per second,
but it could take one minute to compute 2+2 if addition must be emulated.
So the first devices will be more like specialized coprocessors and DSPs.

Ciao,
Alfio





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