A radically different kind of chip created by Chinese researchers can now handle real-world data tasks, potentially reshaping artificial intelligence systems’ reliance on power-hungry digital processors, its developers said.
Building on work reported in October, the Peking University team’s ultra-fast, energy-efficient analogue chip has moved beyond solving basic mathematical problems and can now power applications such as personalised recommendation and image processing.
In a paper published on Monday by the journal Nature Communications, lead author Sun Zhong and his colleagues said the chip achieved a 12-fold speed increase over advanced digital processors, while improving energy efficiency by more than 200 times.
These results were based on the training of recommendation systems using data sets that were comparable in scale to those of Netflix and Yahoo, according to the peer-reviewed paper.