Akhetonics Photonic Computing: 1,000x Faster CPUs | Hacker News Reader

Akhetonics Photonic Computing: 1,000x Faster CPUs

medium.com

So they have some kind of nonlinear material that can make light modulate other light, that they managed to get working at teraherz frequencies?

Sounds incredible, as in: can't believe it.

By the way, isn't Nvidia researching this?

Yes; this material is called "snake oil".

Let's see if the investors bite.

Theranos demonstrated that they'll bite at anything.

I wouldn't infer much from that. Investors are in the business of taking risks and making gambles.

Also "FooCo raises $X zillion round" doesn't mean they got $X zillion deposited into their bank account. There are always several milestones along the way to unlock each tranche. But the press releases never mention that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_optics

Very real stuff (I have a PhD on this)

I mean, researchers have been trying for years, what is different now?

At milliwatt power, and terahertz frequency?

I guess it's a theoretical limit as in the material can change properties that fast given a fast light signal.

This is the second sentence:

> Nonlinear phenomena become relevant only when the input light is very intense. Typically, in order to observe nonlinear phenomena, an intensity of the electromagnetic field of light larger than 108 V/m (and thus comparable to the atomic electric field of ~1011 V/m) is required.

I don’t know anything about this field. Can you address this point? How close are we to overcoming this in academia?

10^8 V/m, yeah that is quite a lot, 100V per micron or 1MV/cm. Even if it works it's going to have reliability issues, especially since the structures are not going to be perfect.

ignore the sibling comment by amelius

for a laser the intensity in the wavelength / frequency domain is very high, because it is coherent radiation

it just means you can use a (low power) laser to produce nonlinear optical effects.

The channel's other uploads may be giving us a glimpse into this project's future.

Yup. UFO conspiracies, aliens on the moon, PSI...

Yeah, who uses anything else than Pascals to measure pressure, clearly shows they are not serious.

It's just as if he had the brilliant idea to do photonics as an outcast even though there is already a 6" wafer semi-production level fablab being built for it in The Netherlands. There is even a version of TinyTapeout for Photonics.

What's this photonic Tiny Tapeout?

Finally! This paves the way towards practical BrainF*** execution.

We're all adults here, you can spell out BrainFuck just fine.

maybe it's brainf**, the pointer heavy formally verified brainfuck dialect

When you say pointer heavy, just how heavy is that pointer?

In traditional brainfuck, a single < suffices to move The Pointer one cell to the left.

For a dialect of brainfuck where The Pointer is 3x as heavy as is traditional, you'd have to apply 3x the effort, i.e. <<<, in order to move one cell to the left.

Cursed bogocomputing idea of the day: a variant of brainfuck where The Pointer is physically simulated, with mass & momentum. < & > apply impulses. The Pointer continues to move across The Array with momentum after you apply an impulse.

This comes up every couple of years, but it hasn't seem to have made any advances since the first time I've seen this.

What level of Universal Paperclips is this?

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Interesting topic, unreadable due to sloppification.

Now it's a good case to use your own ai to un-sloppify

"The first thing to understand about Akhetonics’ optical computer is that it’s not one thing yet." Great, that is such a good explanation. Thanks ChatGPT I guess.

> Photonics

So also 1000x smaller integration

Why?

Light is hundreds of nanometers, smallest "transistor" cannot be much smaller than wavelength.

This has been tried by Cray like 15 years ago and the university of Colorado 11 years ago; there were also other initiatives, all failed.

I'm not excluding that now we have more budget/time/AI to make it work (if it can), I'd just say exercise caution reading this (very AI slop) article (and anything that looks too good to be true)

I didn’t read but I’d also like to point out photonics are 1000x larger than leading edge electronics with minimal path to scaling smaller. I don’t see a free lunch

There ain't no free lunch, but real progress rarely depend on it. It's usually lunch we weren't eating before, or a different way to eat the same lunch but with much more satisfaction.

Basically the density of early CPUs (1970s), but 1000x faster than those, or current CPUs? Like a 1GHz 6502, or a 1THz 6502? The former is not really better, but the latter might interesting.

In honour of Akhenaten? Cool.

References of Akhenaten is making rounds in modern pagan/occult circles as well. The "Law of One" group is really pushing ancient Egyptian 'pyramid power' stuff.

interesting that it is still 2 bit

Do you mean as opposed to operating in an analog fashion? My guess is because keeping it digital means it is as close a possible to a drop-in replacement for today's electronic digital computers, including all the firmware, OS, and software that has already been written for them.

akhetonics-photonic-computing 1000x-faster-cpus, in mice

If you're looking for the limits of this approach: it's about 1000x faster than electric BUT the individual components have to be way larger (and can't be shrinked down)

... which hopefully means a LOT of fabs will be able to produce these (because a 2nm node makes no sense for this)

It also means this will be incredible for radio chips, interconnects, that sort of thing and will do exactly nothing for the first 20 years for cpu's, never mind gpus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com