Neurophos is developing a massive optical systolic array clocked at 56GHz good for 470 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute

As Moore's Law slows to a crawl and the amount of energy required to deliver generational performance gains grows, some chip designers are looking to alternative architectures for salvation.

Neurophos is among those trying to upend Moore's Law and make good on analog computing's long-promised yet largely untapped potential.

The Austin, Texas-based AI chip startup says it's developing an optical processing unit (OPU) that in theory is capable of delivering 470 petaFLOPS of FP4 / INT4 compute — about 10x that of Nvidia's newly unveiled Rubin GPUs — while using roughly the same amount of power.

Neurophos CEO Patrick Bowen tells El Reg this is possible in part because of the micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators, essentially photonic transistors, that the company has spent the past several years developing.

"The equivalent of the optical transistor that you get from Silicon Photonics factories today is massive. It's like 2 ...