Startup claims 100x more efficient processor than current CPUs, secures $16M in funding
Startup claims 100x more efficient processor than current CPUs, secures $16M in funding
Efficient Computer emerged from stealth mode this week, revealing their "Fabric" chip design. According to the company, this novel CPU can provide performance on par with current...
Our processors are 100x more efficient than state-of-the-art low-power CPUs. A single AA battery can power our processors for up to a decade
That's some really extraordinary claim.
An AA battery has around 10kJ of energy; spread over a decade that's 31 microwatts of power. No way they're doing useful computations with that.
A single AA battery is going to discharge itself just sitting on the shelf over a decade
So Intel, Apple, every other company that develops ARM based processors, AMD and Nvidia has just missed this technology ?
We're talking about trillions of dollars in just R'n'D investments and this technology just flew under the radar?
If it sounds too good to be true, it is probably too good to be true.
Usually means "yes this works in theory but only for very specific operations at limited scales that aren't all that important so it's not worth pursuing seriously"
Maybe. But the blue LED was also deemed impossible by a lot of big companies. And then a guy build one. Very interesting video on that topic: https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M
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I mean
Big companies tend to "innovate" by buying market-disrupting startups and squashing the life out of them so they wouldn't need to competeIt probably runs a completely custom instruction set which makes it incompatible with current architectures. Current manufacturers are designing chips that are operable with popular instruction sets.
I'd write it myself if it was a hundred times faster
I mean, we know the absolute limits of computational efficiency thanks to the Landauer limit and the Margolus–Levitin theorem, and from those we know that we are so far from the limits that it is practically unfathomable.
If they can show some evidence that they can perform useful calculations 100x more efficiently than whatever they chose to compare against (definitely a cherry picked comparison) then I'll give them my attention, but others have made similar claims in the past then turned out to be in extremely specific algorithms that use quantum calculations that are of course slower and less efficient on any traditional computer.
I'd like to see these chips benchmarked in the wild as well before getting too excited, but the claims aren't that implausible. Incidentally, this approach is why M series chips are so much faster than x86 ones. Apple uses SoC architecture which eliminates the need for the bus, and they process independent instructions in parallel on multiple cores. And they're just building that on existing ARM architecture. So, it's not implausible that a chip and a compiler designed for this sort of parallelism from ground up could see a huge performance boost.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
fundingevidence."They've been promising quantum computers for three decades with zilch results. I've lost count of how many times and how many startups and even major market players claimed to have working quantum computers, which of course to this day are all just smoke and mirrors.
They've been promising artificial intelligence for three decades with zilch results. Then they redefined what AI means to get venture capital pointing the money hose at it. Now people think a glorified autocomplete and grammar engine is 'artificial intelligence.'
I'll believe it when I see it.
Seems like it uses a bunch of pipelines that are also cross connected. Pretty interesting idea.
What about power and heat?
Efficient, not fast. Just means it’ll sip power as opposed to guzzling it.
The article says that this architecture uses significantly less power which would mean producing less heat as well.