3 ms·

I met someone in Seattle who was working on an optical Asic to mine Bitcoin. Is this in the same direction as this article?

rom-antics 4y ago
Seems unlikely. The paper is about performing certain computations in the analog domain, trading precision for power efficiency. Hashing requires lossless computation.
hedgehog 4y ago
Sounds interesting, can you say who it is?
jlokier 4y ago
There are significant differences, because proof-of-work crypto mining is inherently a digital logic operation, so it's not amenable to photonic analog computing used for, e.g., approximate matrix multiplication and summation used in neural nets. That said, photonic gates for digital circuits hold some promise for power efficiency and speed in their own way. For many of the parameters which apply to crypto mining, it's not so clear whether photonic digital circuits will significantly outperform the best near-future electronic transistors though. (Source: I worked on a photonic crypto circuit design based on 4-wave (non-linear) mixing. Non-linearity is required for digital logic. Even though 4-wave mixing is energy efficient, the design was less efficient and performant than I'd initially hoped from the high spatial parallelism and basic THz figures. The principles still hold a lot of promise.)
- cycomanic 4y ago
  It's funny how ideas come back in some ~30 year cycles. The energy efficiency of optical computing has been discussed quite extensively, e.g. David Miller at Stanford wrote a science paper laying out the fundamental problems with optical nonlinearities for computing, i.e. phonon are bosons and therefore don't like to interact, or optical nonlinearities are very inefficient compared to electronic ones. So in that sense FWM is not efficient. Now for some specific operations optical signal processing might still make sense, for example if you can take advantage of the bandwidth and inherent parallism.
Mdubrov 4y ago
PoWx.org or something else?

rom-antics 4y ago

Seems unlikely. The paper is about performing certain computations in the analog domain, trading precision for power efficiency. Hashing requires lossless computation.

hedgehog 4y ago

Sounds interesting, can you say who it is?

jlokier 4y ago

There are significant differences, because proof-of-work crypto mining is inherently a digital logic operation, so it's not amenable to photonic analog computing used for, e.g., approximate matrix multiplication and summation used in neural nets. That said, photonic gates for digital circuits hold some promise for power efficiency and speed in their own way. For many of the parameters which apply to crypto mining, it's not so clear whether photonic digital circuits will significantly outperform the best near-future electronic transistors though. (Source: I worked on a photonic crypto circuit design based on 4-wave (non-linear) mixing. Non-linearity is required for digital logic. Even though 4-wave mixing is energy efficient, the design was less efficient and performant than I'd initially hoped from the high spatial parallelism and basic THz figures. The principles still hold a lot of promise.)

cycomanic 4y ago
It's funny how ideas come back in some ~30 year cycles. The energy efficiency of optical computing has been discussed quite extensively, e.g. David Miller at Stanford wrote a science paper laying out the fundamental problems with optical nonlinearities for computing, i.e. phonon are bosons and therefore don't like to interact, or optical nonlinearities are very inefficient compared to electronic ones. So in that sense FWM is not efficient. Now for some specific operations optical signal processing might still make sense, for example if you can take advantage of the bandwidth and inherent parallism.

Mdubrov 4y ago

PoWx.org or something else?