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A comment on Optical Transformers. Parent comment

Re:Optical Transformers by speed_spread on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @09:54PM (#34906132)
You still have to store and move the model bits. I/O is gonna be a problem
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Re:Optical Transformers by macrolocal on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @10:16PM (#34906282)
Photonics can be great for I/O, nb.
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Re:Optical Transformers by Dylan16807 on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @11:35PM (#34906811)
I/O is already meeting those performance levels on today's technology.

You can get a hundred dollar SSD that has a read speed around 7 gigabytes per second using just over five watts. That will fill up 8x80GB in a minute and a half of load time. If your energy budget is 24 watts then install four and make it 20-25 seconds.

As far as cost, I don't know what the proposed chip would be, but $400 is 0.5% of that pile of GPUs and SSDs will only get cheaper.

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