This optical chip promises performance improvements of up to 350X versus an RTX 3080

Lightelligence, a photonics company, has just revealed the world’s first smallest photonics-based computing device. What does photonic mean? It means that it uses light to perform computer operations. This company says the drive is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing drive.” 350 times faster than an NVIDIA RTX 3080, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.

Still in a test stage, the photonics arithmetic computing engine, PACE, integrates electronics and photonics in a very format, performing operations at the speed of light and thus achieving extreme acceleration for certain intelligence computing workloads. artificial, deep learning and machine learning.

350 times faster than an RTX 3080

PACE accelerates certain matrix acceleration applications much faster than an NVIDIA RTX 3080 due to the very nature of its computing elements. It’s pretty easy to understand: latency, which is the period of time between when an event is commanded to happen and when it actually happens, is much, much less in the Lightelligence system. That’s the benefit of data traveling at the speed of light.

Lightelligence describes itself as a provider of hardware and software; the company has also designed specific algorithms to solve some of today’s most fundamental computing problems in a photonic environment.

Lightelligence in the future

Lightelligence CEO and founder Yichen Chen had already envisioned a path for optical circuits to be at the forefront of Machine Learning computing efforts. By 2020, the company had already received $ 100 million in financing and employed around 150 employees. A year later, Lightspeed achieves a product that it says is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as the NVIDIA RTX 3080.”

PACE’s debut aims to attract enough capital to comfortably meet its goal of launching an AI accelerator pilot product to market in 2022. That remains just an ambitious goal in the company’s vision, however its goal is to develop and distribute products in mass markets.

He also wants to have a ready photonics hardware solution as of 2023, targeting the cloud retail, financial and artificial intelligence markets.