'Today’s computers are horribly inefficient': How a US startup is going Apple's way — combining hardware and software to crack AI's big 99% power consumption problem | TechRadar
i love how being a software company that also designs hardware is now referred to as "going Apple's way" because everything has to tie back to apple somehow
Hmm I wonder if this will go anywhere. Isn't it similar to what a graphics card does? Calculating specific instructions in an efficient way? But where does it stop being a CPU? When it only supports specific languages?
Idk I think RISC might be the future more than this. 99% less power consumption is only going to make the neural nets a bit better because they need an exponential increase in processing power for linear gains.
This isn't an ai co processor. It sounds more like an fpga that connects a bunch of standalone alus, and also has compiler support for common languages:
The compiler generates a representation of the data flow, places the instructions with an efficient network on chip. A RISC-V core configures the fabric and then shuts down to leave the tiles running, although the fabric can reconfigure itself as a general purpose processor that can run C, C++ or Rust as well as edge AI frameworks and potentially transformer frameworks.
The "the fabric can reconfigure itself" part is interesting too, maybe that's why they're not calling it an fpga