AI chips tagged posts

Addressing the staggering power and energy demands of artificial intelligence, engineers at the University of Houston have developed a revolutionary new thin-film material that promises to make AI devices significantly faster while dramatically cutting energy consumption.

The breakthrough, detailed in the journal ACS Nano, introduces a specialized two-dimensional (2D) thin film dielectric—or an electric insulator—designed to replace traditional, heat generating components in integrated circuit chips...

Penn Engineers have developed the first programmable chip that can train nonlinear neural networks using light—a breakthrough that could dramatically speed up AI training, reduce energy use and even pave the way for fully light-powered computers.

While today’s AI chips are electronic and rely on electricity to perform calculations, the new chip is photonic, meaning it uses beams of light instead. Described in Nature Photonics, the chip reshapes how light behaves to carry out the nonlinear mathematics at the heart of modern AI.

“Nonlinear functions are critical for training deep neural networks,”...

It all started at a Denny’s in San Jose in 1993. Three engineers—Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem—gathered at the diner in what is now the heart of Silicon Valley to discuss building a computer chip that would make graphics for video games faster and more realistic. That conversation, and the ones that followed, led to the founding of Nvidia, the tech company that soared through the ranks of the stock market to briefly top Microsoft as the most valuable company in the S&P 500 this week.

The company is now worth over $3.2 trillion, with its dominance as a chipmaker cementing Nvidia’s place as the poster child of the artificial intelligence boom—a moment that Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, has dubbed “the next industrial revolution.”

On...