A team of Chinese researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tsinghua University has unveiled LightGen, the world's first generative photonic chip designed for AI, in an article published in the prestigious scientific journal Science on December 19.
This chip processes image and video tasks 100 times faster than the current market-leading chip from Nvidia A100. Theoretically, the chip could surpass thecomputational power of traditional electronic chips over ten million times.
Photon Chips
The dominant chips in today's market, such as GPUs, are electronic. They transport data via electrons in semiconductors.
However, electrons encounter significant resistance during transport, generating heat, causing delays, and consuming large amounts of energy for cooling.
In contrast, photons have no mass,generate virtually no resistance and only minimal heat, and significantly reduce cooling requirements.
Previous chips converted photons back and forth to electrons,limiting their use to simple tasks.
Major Breakthroughs
LightGen's main achievement lies in avoiding this traditional conversion bottleneck due to three tech breakthroughs.
First, millions of optical neurons are integrated on a single chip for executing complex tasks, a large number that previous photon chips were unable to reach.
Second, LightGen can create images and videos directly with light using all-optical processing, saving considerable time and energy. Traditional chips often require repeated conversion between optical and electronic, akin to translating between different languages.
Third, the team developed an autonomous learning algorithm thatenables the photonic chip to self-train for generative AI applications without extensive manually labeled data.
Computational Power Surpasses Nvidia
Conservatively estimated, LightGen's computation speed reaches 35,700 TOPS (trillion operations per second), about 100 times faster than leading electronic AI chips like the Nvidia A100.
If equipped with certain external components, the photonic chip could theoretically outcompute electronic chips by up to 10 million times. （Related： Man Kills Three Bystanders, Takes His Own Life in Attack Near Taipei Metro Station ｜ Latest ）
As is, this new technology could still potentially allow data centers to reduce electricity consumption and carbon emissions to just one percent of current levels.
