Posted on Tuesday, March 19 2019 @ 13:44 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Contrary to earlier rumors, NVIDIA did not present details about its future 7nm GPU at its annual GTC event in San Francisco. EE Times
notes the most interesting news nuggets from the three-hour long keynote were a cheaper AI bard and a research project on optical interconnects. In the future, optical components may mean the end of board traces for high-end processors and GPUs.
Presaging that future, Nvidia’s chief scientist, Bill Dally, told reporters about a research project in optical chip-to-chip links. It targets throughput in terabits/second while drawing 2 picojoules/bit/s. In an initial implementation, 32 wavelengths will run at 12.5 Gbits/s each, with a move to 64 wavelengths doubling bandwidth in a follow-up generation.
Dally predicted copper links will start run out of gas as data rates approach 100 Gbits/second, already on many roadmaps for network switches. Progress in more power efficient laser sources and ring resonators will enable the long-predicted shift, he said.
