Optics Grab Attention at Hot Chips 2023
![Image](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTdyKCek-E1HzjRR2Ht5WibJdEnJHrYenbbgd9baUYYkGrsjd-YBlb0iLXrQvWDH725x6QzC8ZDyY6khxR3si_j9Z_8PIUYD1gaQSz0NnJrtxCpqdun5H5-up2t9uIVoYYUB3ZvFVJTD1LCSdz8uqaC_w3pkqHl31s_l3e7qTxTDp3QmRa28RZ5aoZG3I/w640-h398/Hot%20Chips%202023%20Newsletter.png)
August marked the in-person return of the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University in California, and the sold-out 35th edition included plenty of deep technical content. AI/ML garnered lots of attention and optical interconnects were featured in both chip- and system-level AI and HPC talks. NVIDIA’s chief scientist, Bill Dally, keynoted Day 2 with a talk reviewing how accelerators achieved a 1,000x performance increase over the last 10 years. His big-picture view provided excellent context for AI-system design, but networking received only an honorable mention this year. Instead, Dally discussed future directions for accelerated compute. Following the keynote, an ML-Training session presented talks from Google and Cerebras. The technical lead for TPUs at Google , Norm Jouppi made it clear he could only discuss the n-1 generation, meaning TPUv4. Meanwhile, Google revealed the TPUv5e at its own Google Cloud Next event the same day but provided only high-level specification