AI Chip Architectures
jepeake.com
jepeake.com
Companies like EnCharge, Mythic, etc.
And much more efficient devices like RRAM, MRAM, and FETs. Like FE-FETs with AlScN.
The stuff just coming out of research or still in research is more exciting in terms of the potential for truly huge efficiency and performance boosts.
Taalas is interesting also because of it's efficiency and speed. Guess it was just purchased by AMD.
If they are in some analog half-open state they have both resistance and current, which means waste heat.
Also transistors in modern chips are already so small that you can literally count the number of electrons flowing through them. At the smallest scale, nature becomes discrete. So if there are something like 128 electrons, you only get 7 bits of 'analog' to play with anyway.
It is a very interesting concept and the company Q.Ant has delivered working products and software. Apparently it can greatly speed up certain training applications and future designs will solve some of the current problems.
The energy and performance advantages seem to be worth the R&D. If some form of optical memory to replace DRAM in the chain could be designed, that would solve several conversion costs between optical to digital.
Either way it is pretty cool to do math this way, basically just using light.
e.g for a Mach-Zehnder interferometer measuring the phase shifts requires many photons. A single photon arrives or doesn't arrive at the detector. Even if you could perfectly ensure it hits detector at the same time as the reference photon and subsequently detect with 100% quantum efficiency, that still only gives you 1 bit of phase information, not an analog value.
Digital can be done more efficiently with adiabatic or asynchronous circuits. The limiting factor then is speed and chip area rather than joules-per-and-gate.
Recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352470
Ignorant people are always certain.
Not slope tho!
When the density of italicized words is about 1:1, I'm out.
In all cases it was meatbag. In the 1st case gave chatGPT 0.35. The remaining ones were much lower.
EDIT: I didn't ask just to generate some text. The original prompt was very specific, which is most of the time the way I use LLMs anyways. Probably it catches better the "hey just generate this email...".
One of the best deep-dives on AI chip architectures that I've ever read.
Other posters are welcome to their opinions, but I (again, personally) thought it was great!
My brother bought one. I challenged him to find something that actually used the AI chip on the laptop. He couldn't - it always read at 0% in task manager.
As a consumer, I'd rather have that much more graphics card, hard drive space, or RAM for the price than a specialized chip thats almost never used and, when it is used, only saves you a little electricity.