Top all-time · #5056
Lightmatter®
Company blog · lightmatter.co/bloghardwareai
Lightmatter® is the company blog at lightmatter.co, writing about hardware and ai. Since 2021, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Lightmatter – The photonic (super)computer company”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Lightmatter for its photonic AI accelerator, the Envise chip, and its claims of faster, lower-energy deep learning than Nvidia GPUs. Comments are mostly pointers to its product pages.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Rethinking the limits of AI, Lightmatter merges photonics and computing to build a future where speed, efficiency, and intelligence converge.
Most-linked posts?
- Lightmatter – The photonic (super)computer company9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-04-12
- /products/envise/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-01
What Hacker News says?
Photonic processor is coming out this year, claiming to be up to 10x faster than nvidia A100 in BERT and using 90% less energy - https://lightmatter.co/products/envise/
Comment linking /products/envise/
on “Ask HN: What technology is “cutting edge” in 2022?”Submitted A New Kind of Computer (April 2025) as a story · 62 points
HN discussionLightmatter is apparently shipping their photonic accelerator to early adopters right now https://lightmatter.co/products/envise/ They claim quite big performance uplift over current GPUs and even better performance per watt figures. However I haven’t seen independent benchmarks for their Envise ASIC yet. They seem to be using a different method with an external laser to “power” the chips using fiber optic cables ra…
Comment linking /products/envise/
on “The future of deep learning is photonic”Submitted Lightmatter – The photonic (super)computer company as a story · 8 points
HN discussionAdding a few I know of: https://groq.com/ - From the team that built the original TPU at Google https://lightmatter.co/ - Light tubes instead of copper
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on “Ask HN: Chip startups?”Submitted Lightmatter – The photonic (super)computer company as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'm really excited by the idea of using analog computing for AI, and the advent of analog chips. Anyone know if there's a cloud provider offering hourly access to analog compute? As an aside, I recently learned of https://lightmatter.co/ , a photonic chip manufacturer
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on “Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light”Submitted Lightmatter as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLightmatter [0] is doing something along those lines. But IIUC they're only attempting optical computing for certain mathematical ops (FMA and/or convolution?) [0] https://lightmatter.co/
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on “Intel: Advances in silicon photonics can break the I/O “power wall””Submitted Open Silicon Photonics for AI Systems Initiative as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou should take a look at companies like https://lightmatter.co/ Photonic chips for analog matrix processing are already being commercialized. The underlying platform, CMOS Silicon Photonics is commercial already (in every data center) and produced in high volume. Heavyhash can be constructed such that the Keccak hashes comprise a minimal amount of the work. Quoting from the BIP: "Below is a conceptual representatio…
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on “Durable, Low Energy Bitcoin Algorithm Proposal”I guess this is a more or less hidden advertisement for https://lightmatter.co/products/ who, BTW, I believe have a horrible homepage. Greek letters, large nondescript images, useless source code. It looks more like yet another hipster dating app than like breakthrough hardware research. And it seems the product page focuses mostly on their admittedly amazing fan design and less on what's inside that pretty cooling…
Comment linking /products/
on “The future of deep learning is photonics”yes, see https://lightmatter.co
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on “Intel Shows 8 Core 528 Thread Processor with Silicon Photonics”From the last thread on this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32610780 ): - https://sambanova.ai/ (Enterprise AI and dataflow-as-a-service for established models) - https://www.cerebras.net/ (AI accelerator, trying to compete with Nvidia) - https://www.graphcore.ai/ (Another AI accelerator company, UK based) - https://femtosense.ai/ (Sparse NNs on very low power chips, cool hardware and software challenges) -…
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on “OpenAI is exploring making its own AI chips and evaluates acquisition targets”Depends on what you mean by light-computer. https://lightmatter.co/
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on “Large Photonic Processor Solves Graph Problems”i’m very excited for the next generation of photonics accelerators, like https://lightmatter.co/ to give massive compute speedups for linear algebra
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on “Ask HN: What are you excited about?”
