Huawei is making future preparation for analog and photon computing

Huawei is hosting the 18th HAS between 12 to 14 April 2021 in Shenzhen China. Director of Huawei and Dean of the Strategic Research Institute- Xu Wenwei deliver the keynote speech on “Towards an Intelligent World 2030-Technical Challenges and Research Directions”.

According to him, the demand for computing power will increase a hundredfold by 2030. Then, building a supercomputing power is going to be a big concern. There is a high probability for analog computing and photon computing to encounter application scenarios.

In order to make future preparation, Huawei is focusing to study analog computing as well the photon computing. He believes that in the coming decade the network connection will be increased billionfold. Then, the broadband speed will surely reach 10Gbps per person.

In this case, the computing power, as well as the storage capacity, will also be increased by 100 times. These all phenomenons will jointly increase the use of renewable energy by 50%. To fulfill all that production, deployment, processing, and utilization of that much energy, the technology also is obligated to be more advance.

Talking about the present situation, the yearly improvement rate of single-core CPU performance has declined by 40%, and general-purpose computing is inefficient in specific areas. In this scenario, creating supercomputing power is really a great challenge.

All we need to shift digital computing from general-purpose to a special purpose. We need to study versatile computing, where multiple computing architectures coincide, and various CPUs, GPUs, and XPUs coincide.

He further said analog computing has specific befits for the specific areas. Photon computing will be implemented in signal processing, combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and other fields, especially for wireless Massive MIMO and optical communications. In the future, these will surely bring enriched opportunities.

(Via – ithome)