A research team from Tsinghua University, together with its partners, has successfully broken through the physical limitations of traditional chips. They innovatively proposed a new computing framework for optoelectronic fusion, and developed the international first all-analog optoelectronic intelligent computing chip (ACCEL for short). Experiments have shown that the chip has more than 3,000 times the arithmetic power of current high-performance commercial chips in intelligent visual target recognition tasks.
This ultra-high-performance all-analog optoelectronic intelligent computing chip has made breakthroughs in three international challenges, such as large-scale computational unit integration, high-efficiency nonlinearities, and high-speed optoelectronic interfaces. At the same time, it is characterized by high energy efficiency and high speed.
To ensure the reliability of the experimental data, the research team conducted large-scale real-world measurements and verification. For the first time, they applied end-to-end cross-layer collaboration technology to intelligent visual interaction, and utilized equivalent arithmetic power to accurately assess energy efficiency performance and latency data.
The ACCEL chip has three major advantages: first, its system-level computing power reaches 3,000 times that of existing high-performance chips. If this is compared to the time of transportation to analogize the information flow calculation, it is equivalent to shortening the 8-hour Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed railway to 8 seconds. Second, it has a system-level energy efficiency of 74.8 Peta-OPS/W, which is a 4 million times improvement over existing high-performance GPUs, TPUs, and other computing architectures. In other words, the power required to work for one hour with existing chips can be used to work for ACCEL for more than 500 years.
In addition, the production cost of ACCEL is only a few tenths of the latter, and the materials used are relatively simple and easy to obtain. These features make ACCEL cheaper.
By breaking through the physical bottleneck of traditional chips and introducing optoelectronic fusion technology, Tsinghua University’s research team has successfully developed the world’s first all-analog optoelectronic intelligent computing chip, ACCEL, which is an ultra-high-performance, low-power, and low-cost chip that opens up new paths for ultra-high-performance computer development.