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MIT Develops New Chip That Reduces Neural Networks' Power Consumption by Up to 95 Percent (mit.edu)
MIT researchers have developed a special-purpose chip that increases the speed of neural-network computations by three to seven times over its predecessors, while reducing power consumption 94 to 95 percent. From a report: That could make it practical to run neural networks locally on smartphones or even to embed them in household appliances. "The general processor model is that there is a memory in some part of the chip, and there is a processor in another part of the chip, and you move the data back and forth between them when you do these computations," says Avishek Biswas, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, who led the new chip's development. "Since these machine-learning algorithms need so many computations, this transferring back and forth of data is the dominant portion of the energy consumption. But the computation these algorithms do can be simplified to one specific operation, called the dot product. Our approach was, can we implement this dot-product functionality inside the memory so that you don't need to transfer this data back and forth?"
The MIT press release says next to nothing, unfortunately. AFAICT, they don't reference any published article, or any kind of link to more information, so it is hard to assess. I really wanted to know more so I'm a little disappointed with MIT.
There are a few things that indicates that this is not even comparable to Google TPU:
1. The lack of more information.
2. They label it as a prototype.
3. The top person link goes to a first year graduate student (making a real ASIC takes a slightly larger team, I hear).
Without more detailed information, this is hard to distinguish from PR.