[ExI] World’s First Silicon Photonic Neural Network Unveiled

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Mon Nov 21 12:08:45 UTC 2016


Neural networks using light could lead to superfast computing.

by Emerging Technology from the arXiv  November 18, 2016

<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602938/worlds-first-silicon-photonic-neural-network-unveiled/>

Quotes:

Optical computing has long been the great white hope of computer
science. Photons have significantly more bandwidth than electrons and
so can process more data more quickly. But the advantages of optical
data processing systems have never outweighed the additional cost of
making them, and so they have never been widely adopted.

That has started to change in some areas of computing, such as analog
signal processing, which requires the kind of ultrafast data
processing that only photonic chips can provide.

The results show just how fast photonic neural nets can be. “The
effective hardware acceleration factor of the photonic neural network
is estimated to be 1,960 × in this task,” say Tait and co. That’s a
speed up of three orders of magnitude.

That opens the doors to an entirely new industry that could bring
optical computing into the mainstream for the first time. “Silicon
photonic neural networks could represent first forays into a broader
class of silicon photonic systems for scalable information
processing,” say Taif and co.
---------


They mention much faster processing, but not heat dissipation. I think
the big leap forward in photonic computing will be that it provides
faster computing with little or no heat being generated. So hopefully
most of the Jupiter brain cooling problems will disappear.


BillK




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