From 8-bit micros to modelling the brain

Part 1: An interview with computer scientist, Professor Steve Furber

Steve Furber is renowned for architecting the 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor from Acorn Computer, which became the founding architecture for Arm.

Arm processors have played a recurring role in Furber's career. He and his team developed a clockless - asynchronous - version of the Arm, while a specialist Arm design has been the centrepiece building block for a project to develop a massively-parallel neural network computer.

Professor Steve Furber

Origins

I arrive at St Pancras International station early enough to have a coffee in the redeveloped St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, the architecturally striking building dating back to the 19th century that is part of the station.

The train arrives on time at East Midlands Parkway, close to Nottingham, where Professor Steve Furber greets me and takes me to his home.

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The computing problem of our time: Moving data

• Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric technology can deliver up to 700 terabits per second of bidirectional bandwidth per chip package.
• The start-up has recently raised $100 million in funding.

The size of AI models that implement machine learning continue to grow staggeringly fast.

Such AI models are used for computer vision, large language models such as ChatGPT, and recommendation systems that rank items such as search results and music playlists.

David Lazovsky

The workhorse silicon used to build such AI models are graphics processing units (GPUs). GPU processing performance and their memory size may be advancing impressively but AI model growth is far outpacing their processing and input-output [I/O] capabilities.

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Using light to connect an AI processor’s cores

Lightelligence is using silicon photonics to connect 64 cores of its AI processor. But the company has bigger ambitions for its optical network-on-chip technology 

Lightelligence has unveiled its optical network-on-chip designed to scale multiprocessor designs.

The start-up’s first product showcasing the technology is the Hummingbird, a system-in-package that combines Lightelligence’s 64-core artificial intelligence (AI) processor and a silicon photonics chip linking the processor’s cores.

Maurice Steinman

A key issue impeding the scaling of computing resources is the ‘memory wall’ which refers to the growing gap between processor and memory speeds, causing processors to be idle as they wait for data to crunch.

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Fibre to everywhere

For years, passive optical networks (PON) were all about fibre-to-the-premise, particularly fibre-to-the-home. Japan, South Korea, and China led the market with massive PON deployments.

"Now the focus is on fibre-to-everywhere, whether it's a home, a business, a school, a university, an enterprise, a traffic light," says Julie Kunstler, chief analyst, broadband access intelligence at Omdia.

Julie Kunstler

Adoption has also become global. India is one example, a market where the mobile phone has been the predominant broadband source. Now, several million consumers have fibre-based broadband due to a growing Indian middle class requiring the service for work. A similar story is unfolding in Africa.

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Broadcom's first Jericho3 takes on AI's networking challenge

Broadcom’s Jericho silicon has taken an exciting turn.

Oozie Parizer

The Jericho devices are used for edge and core routers.

But the first chip of Broadcom’s next-generation Jericho is aimed at artificial intelligence (AI); another indicator, if one is needed, of AI’s predominance.

Dubbed the Jericho3-AI, the device networks AI accelerator chips that run massive machine-learning workloads.

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Brandon Collings

There are certain news items on media sites that nothing can prepare you for.

A post by Lumentum on LinkedIn paid tribute to the passing of CTO Brandon Collings, aged 51; the unfolding words revealing the magnitude of the company’s loss.

Brandon Collings was a wonderful person and a joy to know. He had that rarest gift of being able to explain complex technologies and make sense of trends with considered answers of extraordinary clarity.

Who else could explain the intricacies of a colourless, directionless, contention-less, flexible, reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) while describing the ROADM market as “glacially slow”?

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Neil McRae: What’s next for the telecom industry

In a talk at the FutureNet World conference, held in London on May 3-4, Neil McRae explains why he is upbeat about the telecoms industry's prospects

Neil McRae at Futurenet World, London earlier this month.

Neil McRae is tasked with giving the final talk of the two-day FutureNet World conference.

"Yeah, I'm on the graveyard shift," he quips.

McRae, the former chief network architect at BT, is now chief network strategist at Juniper Network. 

The talk’s title is "What's Next", McRae's take on the telecom industry and how it can grow.

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