A team of engineers has developed a new kind of computer chip that uses light instead of electricity to perform one of the most power-intensive parts of artificial intelligence — image recognition and similar pattern-finding tasks.
New light-based chip boosts power efficiency of AI tasks 100 fold
A team of engineers has developed a new kind of computer chip that uses light instead of electricity to perform one of the most power-intensive parts of artificial intelligence — image recognition and similar pattern-finding tasks.
Using light dramatically cuts the power needed to perform these tasks, with efficiency 10 or even 100 times that of current chips performing the same calculations. Using this approach could help rein in the enormous demand for electricity that is straining power grids and enable higher performance AI models and systems.
This machine learning task, called “convolution,” is at the heart of how AI systems process pictures, videos and even language. Convolution operations currently require large amounts of computing resources and time. These new chips, though, use lasers and microscopic lenses fabricated onto circuit boards to perform convolutions with far less power and at faster speeds.