China develops 'LightGen' all-optical chip, 100 times faster than NVIDIA chips
Chinese scientists have unveiled a new AI chip called LightGen, which is 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient than Nvidia's most advanced chips.
All-optical synthesis chip for large-scale intelligent semantic vision generation | Science
Chinese team builds optical chip AI that is 100 times faster than Nvidia's market leader | South China Morning Post
All-optical chip achieves 100-fold speed boost over top-tier NVIDIA chips
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-optical-chip-boost-tier-nvidia.html
LightGen: Optical AI Chip 100x Faster Than Nvidia A100
https://www.webpronews.com/lightgen-optical-ai-chip-100x-faster-than-nvidia-a100/
Traditional electronic chips like Nvidia's rely on electrical signals, which generate heat and consume huge amounts of power. Scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed a new method to transfer information using light instead of electricity.
While systems that use light to transmit information have been known for some time, they have struggled to handle highly complex generative AI tasks such as image synthesis and video generation. Scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University developed their new AI chip, LightGen, by focusing on three areas: building a new architecture, developing new training algorithms, and achieving high integration density on the chip.
'LightGen' is packed with more than 2 million photon 'neurons' on a 136.5 square millimeter chip, and it utilizes 'optical latent space' where data can flow rapidly in the most compact form, enabling efficient compression and reconstruction of information.
Unlike transistors in a standard chip, which process data sequentially as simple on-off switches, these neurons process information in parallel, enhancing their performance. These neurons are specially designed to mimic the human brain.
Benchmark tests using LightGen showed that it achieved a maximum computing power of 35,700 TOPS and an energy efficiency of 664 TOPS per watt, which is 100 times faster than the NVIDIA A100 chip, the standard in AI computing, and consumes 1/100th the power.
If commercially available, this chip could enable unprecedented processing speeds and reduce the environmental burden of power-hungry data centers.
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in Hardware, Posted by log1p_kr