Lightmatter outlines optical scale-up choices for AI systems

Lightmatter's October 20 PECC presentation examines optical links between accelerators, memory and compute. The stated scope includes co-packaged optical I/O, three-dimensional photonic interposers and parallel microLED approaches.

These architectures address a system problem: larger AI jobs need more devices to exchange data without interconnect power and latency consuming the gain from additional compute.

A presentation abstract outlines a company's view of the design space. It does not provide a like-for-like performance comparison by itself. Useful evaluation needs bandwidth, reach, power, packaging and reliability measured under the conditions in which the link would actually operate.