On April 13, it was reported that as one of the troika of artificial intelligence, computing power is the key to training AI models and inference tasks.
The new results of the research team of Tsinghua University were released in the latest issue of Science in the early morning of April 12, creating the first distributed breadth intelligent optical computing architecture, developing the world's first large-scale interference diffraction heterogeneous integrated chip "Taichi", and realizing 160 TOPS/W general intelligent computing.
According to reports, in the process of developing the "Taiji" optical chip architecture, the inspiration came from the classic book "Zhou Yi", and the team members established a new computing model inspired by "Yi has Taiji, is the birth of two instruments", and realized the release of the powerful performance of optical computing.
Optical computing, as the name suggests, is to change the computing carrier from electricity to light, and use the propagation of light in the chip for computing, with its ultra-high parallelism and speed, it is considered to be one of the most powerful competitive solutions for future disruptive computing architectures.
Optical chips have the advantage of high-speed and high-parallel computing, and are expected to be used to support advanced AI applications such as large models.
According to Xu Zhiwu, the first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electronics, in the "Taiji" architecture, the top-down coding split-decoding reconstruction mechanism simplifies complex intelligent tasks and splits them into multi-channel and high-parallel subtasks.
The paper reports: "Taiji" optical chip has an area efficiency of 879T MACS/mm and an energy efficiency of 160 TOPS/N. For the first time, optical computing is empowered to realize complex AI tasks such as thousands of types of objects in natural scenes and cross-modal content generation.
The "Taiji" optical chip is expected to provide computing power support for large model training and reasoning, general artificial intelligence, and autonomous intelligent unmanned systems.
[Source: Fast Technology]