New Chinese analogue AI chip

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https://www.firstpost.com/tech/new-chinese-analogue-ai-chip-leaps-ahead-with-12x-speed-and-1-200th-the-energy-of-digital-rivals-ws-e-13971993.html#google_vignette

Chinese researchers have developed an analogue AI chip that runs 12 times faster and uses 1/200th the energy of traditional digital processors.

In a potential shift in how future AI systems are powered, researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing have unveiled a ground-breaking all-analogue photoelectronic chip that significantly outperforms conventional digital processors in both speed and energy efficiency.

Known as ACCEL (All-Analogue Chip Combining Electronic and Light Computing), the processor represents a radical departure from the binary 0s and 1s of standard silicon, utilising the physical properties of light to perform computations at unprecedented speeds.

The results, published in the journal Nature, suggest that ACCEL can perform vision-related AI tasks—such as image recognition and autonomous driving calculations at a processing rate nearly 3,000 times faster than NVIDIA’s widely used A100 GPU, as reported by SCMP.

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Pre-pandemic there was a startup in Austin trying to do the same thing. There are a lot of reasons to try to do that. Unfortunately, some very good reasons as to why it doesn’t work like one would think it would.