[HN Gopher] Research team demonstrates world's fastest optical n...
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       Research team demonstrates world's fastest optical neuromorphic
       processor
        
       Author : sizzle
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2021-01-08 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.swinburne.edu.au)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.swinburne.edu.au)
        
       | sroussey wrote:
       | There are several universities, big corporations, and startups
       | taking another look at analog computing, and ML seems to be
       | application that will make it viable.
        
       | hikerclimber wrote:
       | hopefully this isn't true.
        
       | cosmodisk wrote:
       | Just simply pause for a second and admire this part: 10 trillion
       | per second. No matter how you look at it, that's a lot.
        
         | p1esk wrote:
         | That's a lot, but the way to look at it is: "how many TOPS per
         | second _per watt_ when we run Resnet-50 on it "
        
       | ben_w wrote:
       | Always nice to see optical processors in the news.
       | 
       | How do the 10 TeraOPs/s on this compare to the 11 on the Apple
       | M1?
        
         | p1esk wrote:
         | It's far too early to compare this with any commercial NN
         | accelerators. From the article:
         | 
         |  _Although the performance of ONNs is not yet competitive with
         | leading-edge electronic processors at >200 TOPS (for example,
         | Google TPU and other chips), there are straightforward
         | approaches towards increasing our performance both in scale and
         | speed. Further, with a single processor speed of 11.3 TOPS, our
         | VCA is approaching this range. The CA is fundamentally limited
         | in data size only by the electrical digital-to-analogue
         | converter memory, and processing 4K-resolution (4,096x2,160
         | pixels) images at >7,000 frames per second is possible. The 720
         | synapses of the CNN (72 wavelengths per synapses per neuron, 10
         | neurons), a substantial increase for optical networks, enabled
         | us to classify the MNIST dataset. Nonetheless, further scaling
         | is needed to increase the theoretical prediction accuracy from
         | 90% to that of state-of-the-art electronics, typically
         | substantially greater than 95%._
        
           | hetspookjee wrote:
           | 7k fps on 4k resolution is an absurd amount of bandwidth. For
           | 8 bit pixels that is 619 Gbps. Very interesting. Thanks.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | bhassel wrote:
       | ArsTechnica article discussing this paper (and one other), with a
       | bit of background information:
       | https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/two-ways-of-performi...
        
       | bra-ket wrote:
       | arxiv paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07393.pdf
        
       | RocketSyntax wrote:
       | "10x the performance of TPU"
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-08 23:00 UTC)