@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20250407

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

- US Tariffs and Technology Sector - Intel-TSMC Joint Venture? - DARPA fuels Waferscale co-packaged optics via Cerebras and Ranovus - Sandia National Lab to test laser-based photonic cooling via Maxwell Labs - 8 Tbps optical UCIe chiplet for scale-up by Ayar Labs - Lightmatter 3D co-packaged optics [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/HPCNB_20250407.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20250407 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC News Bites, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black of Inside HPC, and with me is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. Well, Shaheen, it was not a quiet week in the world of HPC AI, nor the world at large. The top story in our industry is a tentative deal between Intel and TSMC, which we'll get to in a moment.

The bigger story is the announcement of tariffs by the US that are imposed on friends and foes alike, which could have strong impact on sections of the technology industry, although the chip industry has been exempted for now. So the big news is of a potential Intel TSMC deal with the creation of a joint venture in which Intel puts in their factory assets and resources, and TSMC brings its know-how and access to what amounts to every customer in the market. TSMC would own 20% of the joint venture, but it is not clear whether the remaining 80%

would be owned by Intel alone or include other investors. Interestingly, after the initial report of the deal on Thursday from the publication The Information, Intel stock rose only to fall sharply on Friday accompanied by speculation that perhaps Intel's highly touted 18A Advanced Chip fab may be falling short of expectations. And then two senior Intel executives, the heads of human resources and of technology development both announced their departures in the coming months. So Intel Ajeda continues.

It does. It looked like the markets liked the idea of Intel TSMC, but a lot is going on in the market. So when Intel stock went back down, it was hard to tell whether this news helped or hurt. US trade policies culminating in broad and significant tariffs, as well as moves towards military realignment and territorial overtures and big cuts in government departments and science and research funding all add up to business uncertainty and compel businesses to step back to replan their strategies and operations. We can imagine all the meetings in corporate offices everywhere last week looking at materials flow routes, pricing, customer communication, e-commerce policies, etc. As you said, the chip industry was not

part of the tariffs, but the technology supply chain includes a lot of other things and is complex, often routed through several countries. So tariffs by those countries or by the US will add friction. There will also be some demand shock because of tariffs and cuts in government personnel and government funding of research. Business agility has always been a value proposition of digital transformation, so businesses that have already gone through some kind of digitization and business process automation will be able to respond faster. Now we've all seen the eye-popping performance of the AI chip companies such as Sampanova and Grok. That group also includes Cerebris, of course, with

its unusual dinner plate-sized wafer scale processor. Personally, I felt there's a decent likelihood that this group could have a breakout moment in which they're adopted by a major organization for AI workloads that fit them well, possibly from the government sector. And maybe such a moment has arrived with the news last week that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

that has played such an important role in the development of HPC, has awarded a contract to Cerubris to develop a system combining their wafer-scale technology with wafer-scale co-packaged optics from Ottawa-based Ranovis. The intent is to deliver, quote, several orders of magnitude better compute performance and a fraction of the power draw Well, regardless of anything this promises to be a very very cool system Cerebris, of course has already demonstrated impressive performance in AI compute and has had the backing of G42 AI a technology holding and also investment company based in the Middle East to build large scale supercomputers in the US.

So this is a next phase sort of development. And it is timely coming on the heels of Nvidia boosting silicon photonics and the optical fiber communications conference last week in San Francisco, where many announcements were made about co-packaged optics. Bandwidth, latency, and coherency are the three hurdles of fast data, so combining wafer scale optical data paths to wafer scale chips seems very much like the next step. Think of chips as buildings, and if you can avoid leaving the building, crossing the street, and into another building, that can save you a lot of time and energy.

Keeping it all inside one chip lets large chips get faster, and wafer scale takes that to the limit. Will we see larger wafers than today's 30-centimeter standard? Maybe. That was tried some years ago, but there wasn't enough industry support for it across the supply chain. Cerebris has paved some of that way. There was news last week from the always intriguing optical I.O. sector, as you mentioned.

IR Labs announced an 8 terabytes per second optical chiplet for scale-up AI architectures. Lightmatter, which describes itself as a photonic supercomputing company, announced what it said is the first 3D co-packaged optics product. And San Francisco-based Lessengers said it is targeting the hyperscale sector with the first 1.6 terabit multimode optical transceivers for AI workloads. This flurry of news, as mentioned, came out of the annual Optical Fiber Communications Conference. This optical I.O. activity makes me think of the recent spate of news from the quantum industry in which reports of

quasi-quantum superiority are coming from companies and from one of the national labs. We're tempted to think that this activity around the holy grail of quantum advantage may mean we're close to seeing it actually happen. And the same goes for optical I.O. Possibly we're approaching commercial viability. Photonics for communication within a rack, a board, or a chip is gaining momentum with a growing list of companies announcing actual products coming in the next few months. I have what I call a realness spectrum, and these companies are starting to look very real. Quantum is not quite in the same stage yet. But photons carry not just data. They

can also carry energy. Well, Minnesota-based startup Maxwell Labs has entered into an R&D agreement with San Diego National Lab and the University of New Mexico to demonstrate laser-based photonic cooling for computer chips, aiming to better existing approaches based on air, water, or other liquids. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC News Bytes is a production of OrionX in association with InsideHPC. Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. us.