Optical I/O is being singled out by top companies to push computing beyond exascale and into zettascale. The technology was singled out in a recent speech by AMD CEO Lisa Su as a critical technology to reach zettascale computing from both a power and performance perspective.
“Optical communication is a key area that we think is very, very important for us to reach anything like zettascale type of computing capability,” Su said.
Optical communication has been used for decades, largely in telecommunications, to speed up transmission over long distances. The hardware so far has required pluggable modules to transmit and receive signals, as the data travels over long distances from one point to another.
But chipmakers are now bringing optical I/O closer to the chip layer for short-distance communications in supercomputers and datacenter infrastructure. For example, optics could be used to link up GPUs in close range.
AMD is working with DARPA on packaging optics solutions into chips, Su said.
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