02/07/2018 The Economist
The response from various firms has been to design processors from the ground up with AI in mind. The result of Graphcore’s efforts is called an intelligent processing unit (IPU). This name is not just marketing: on GPUs, memory (the staging area for data) and brain (where they are processed) are kept separate—meaning that data constantly have to be ferried back and forth between the two areas, creating a bottleneck with data-heavy AI applications. To do away with it, Graphcore’s chips do not just have hundreds of mini-brains, but the memory is placed right next to it, minimising data traffic.
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