China can’t buy Nvidia’s RTX 4090. Now its optical chip is twice as fast

Chinese researchers have developed the first highly parallel optical computing integrated chip, named “Meteor-1”, setting a milestone for using light to perform an enormous number of operations at the same time, the scientists say.

The advance promises hardware acceleration for AI and data centres struggling with soaring computational demands.

The chip achieves a theoretical peak computing power of 2,560 TOPS (tera-operations per second) at 50GHz optical frequency – performance comparable to Nvidia’s advanced GPUs – according to a report by Chinese publisher DeepTech last week.

Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 5090 graphic card, for instance, peaks at 3,352 TOPS while its previous flagship RTX 4090 only reached 1,321 TOPS. In the past, optical chips remained mostly in laboratory settings, and could not come close to commercial flagship GPUs in real-life tasks.

Nvidia’s 4090 and 5090 are effectively banned for sale to China because of US export controls on advanced semiconductors and AI chips that could aid Beijing in advancing its military capabilities.

As traditional electronic chips hit fundamental physical limits – from heat build-up, quantum effects and unsustainable power consumption – optical computing emerges as a critical future direction. Its inherent advantages, such as ultra-high speed, broad bandwidth, low power and minimal latency, position it to overcome these barriers.

Progress in optical computing has long focused on two key challenges: scaling up the matrix size and increasing optical frequency. Existing top models – exemplified by prototypes from TSMC and the California Institute of Technology – are pushing against both engineering and physical limits.

Consequently, a third way – expanding computational parallelism, or the ability of chips to multitask – has become the necessary path forward.

  

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