"It's fundamental," Nigel Toon, co-founder and chief executive of computer startup Graphcore, told ZDNet in a video interview last week from his home in England.
"We've got a very different approach and a very different architecture" from conventional computer chips, said Toon. "The conversations we have with customers are, here's a new tool for your toolbox that allows you to do different things, and to solve different problems."
Last week, Toon had a nice proof of concept to offer of where things might be going. Microsoft machine learning scientist Sujeeth Bharadwaj gave a demonstration of work he's done on the Graphcore chip to recognize COVID-19 in chest X-rays, during a virtual conference about AI in healthcare. Bharadwaj's work showed, he said, that the Graphcore chip could do in 30 minutes what it would take five hours to do on a conventional chip from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley company that dominates the running of the neural network.