Chinese scientists managed to produce a chip that can perform artificial intelligence tasks 3 thousand times faster than NVIDIA’s A100 GPU. The basis of this success lies in the use of light-based technology. Here are the details…
China succeeded this time! Artificial intelligence chip that makes a difference to NVIDIA: ACCEL
This artificial intelligence chip produced by China can currently only perform certain tasks such as image recognition. However, it can work much faster than the products we currently see. Because performing calculations using light particles called photons enables faster calculations and energy efficiency than traditional electric current-based chips.
When we look at the general reports about this chip, we see that it offers significantly higher speed and higher energy efficiency than existing high-performance artificial intelligence chips such as NVIDIA A100 when performing some specific tasks such as image recognition and autonomous driving.
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This success was not expected anytime soon, as the US has imposed some embargoes against China, restricting its access to technology, including advanced chips. However, we clearly understand that China is making great efforts to catch up with the USA in the artificial intelligence race.
This new product is called All Analog Chip Using Electronics and Light, or simply ACCEL It is called. Of course, the light-based chip technology we just mentioned is not actually a new thing. However, the technology of the chips used today is based on electric current because it is quite difficult to control photons.
Let’s look at some more details if you want. China’s ACCEL chip manages to reach a speed of 4.6 PFLOPS, 3 thousand times higher than the NVIDIA A100 in laboratory tests. In addition, it consumes 4 million times less energy.
Due to the US embargo, China cannot access the advanced lithography machines used in the production of the A100. Therefore, even if it wanted to, it cannot currently produce such a successful chip based on electric current. However, we need to keep in mind that the chip, which has a 3,000-fold difference over the A100 even though it is light-based, comes from a 20-year-old transistor production process owned by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation.
In the article published last week by the research team of Tsinghua University’s automation and electronics engineering department, it was said that the performance of the chip could increase to much higher levels in the coming period with improvements in the construction process and the transition to slightly more expensive production processes below 100 nanometers.
We also said that using light signals greatly increases energy efficiency. It is stated that the energy required to run existing chips for one hour can run ACCEL for more than 500 years.