Lightelligence releases prototype of its optical AI accelerator chip
Accelerator chips that use light rather than electrons to carry out computations promise to supercharge AI model training and inference. In theory, they could process algorithms at the speed of light — dramatically faster than today’s speediest logic-gate circuits — but so far, light’s unpredictability has foiled most attempts to emulate transistors optically.
Boston-based Lightelligence, though, claims it’s achieved a measure of success with its optical AI chip, which today debuts in prototype form. It says that latency is improved up to 10,000 times compared with traditional hardware, and it estimates power consumption at “orders of magnitude” lower.
The chip in question — which is about the size of a printed circuit board — packs photonic circuits similar to optical fibers that transmit signals. It requires only limited energy, because light produces less heat than the electricity, and is less susceptible to changes in ambient temperature, electromagnetic fields, and other noise. It’s designed to slot into existing machines at the network edge, like on-premises servers, and will eventually ship with a software stack compatible with algorithms in commonly used frameworks like Google’s Tensorflow, Facebook’s Caffe2 and Pytorch, and others.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/15/lightelligence-releases-prototype-of-its-optical-ai-accelerator-chip/