Hi! I’m a complete outsider to photonics; I recently visited a semiconductors / photonics conference and heard this talking point about photonics improving AI power efficiency:
AI needs a huge amount of power, especially in moving data to memory / across interconnects (which take ~80% of power in AI clusters). AI is bottlenecked by power, not chip manufacturing.
Moving electrons is energy intensive while moving photons takes much less energy (I’ve heard figures of 100x less).
Therefore photonics will be a crucial enabler of scaling in the future.
And the vibe I have (from talking with testing / manufacturing exhibitors at the conference) is that by 2035, photonics may improve deployed AI cluster-level power efficiency by:
1.5x or better (75% confidence)
2x or better (55% confidence)
3x or better (22% confidence).
I’m curious what you posted a year ago? Was it also about improving power efficiency?
Hi! I’m a complete outsider to photonics; I recently visited a semiconductors / photonics conference and heard this talking point about photonics improving AI power efficiency:
And the vibe I have (from talking with testing / manufacturing exhibitors at the conference) is that by 2035, photonics may improve deployed AI cluster-level power efficiency by:
1.5x or better (75% confidence)
2x or better (55% confidence)
3x or better (22% confidence).
I’m curious what you posted a year ago? Was it also about improving power efficiency?
Post is still up here.
More recent thoughts here.