Photonics Company Lightmatter Names Google TPU Engineer Richard Ho VP of Hardware Engineering

BOSTON — Photonics company Lightmatter has named Richard Ho its new Vice President of Hardware Engineering. Ho spent nearly nine years at Google leading the Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPU) project. At Lightmatter, Ho will spearhead Lightmatter’s chip engineering division with focus on developing and deploying Lightmatter’s photonic AI accelerator and wafer-scale interconnect, designed for […]

Why Hardware Acceleration Is The Next Battleground In Processor Design

In this special guest feature, Theodore Omtzigt from Stillwater Supercomputing writes that as workloads specialize due to scale, hardware accelerated solutions will continue to be cheaper than approaches that utilize general purpose components. “If you’re a CIO who manages integrations of third-party hardware and software, be aware of new hardware acceleration technologies that can reduce the cost of service delivery by orders of magnitude.”

Podcast: Multicore Scaling Slow Down, and Fooling AI

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team has an animated discussion about multicore scaling, how easy it seems to be to mislead AI systems, and some good sized catches of the week. “As CPU performance improvements have slowed down, we’ve seen the semiconductor industry move towards accelerator cards to provide dramatically better results. Nvidia has been a major beneficiary of this shift, but it’s part of the same trend driving research into neural network accelerators, FPGAs, and products like Google’s TPU.”