AI drive spawns new takes on chip design

As soon as we solve machine
learning we will fix printer.

It is has been interesting to see a re-mergence in interest in new chip architectures. Just when you think it is all been done and there's nothing new. Bam! For sure.

The driver these days is A.I. but more particularly the machine learning aspect of AI. GPUs jumped out of the gamer console and onto the Google and Facebook data center. But there was more in the way of hardware tricks to come. The effort is to get around the tableau I here repeatedly cited: the scene is the data scientist sitting there thumb twiddling while the neural machine slowly does its learning.

I know when I saw that Google had created a custom ASIC for Tensor Flow processing, I was taken aback. If new chips are what is needed to succeed in this racket, it will be a rich man's game.

Turns out a slew of startups are on the case. This article by Cade Metz suggests that at least 45 startups are working on chips for AI type applications such as speech recognition and self-driving cars. It seems the Nvidia GPU that has gotten us to where we are, may not be enough going forward. Co processors for co processors, chips that shuttle data about in I/O roles for GPUs, may be the next frontier.

Metz names a number of AI chip startups: Cerbras, Graphcore, Wave Computing, Mythic, Nervana (now part of Intel). - Jack Vaughan

Related
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/technology/artificial-intelligence-chip-start-ups.html