Slashdot Mirror
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?"
It's probably funded by a company or the team/professor is working on Patenting it. This is typical of emergent technology not funded with public money.
Not yet funded with public money. Don't worry, some dumbass grad student(s) who singlehandedly redesign and optimize processors for neural networks won't keep that company position for long. No, as soon as it looks remotely profitable, and after thier dumb ass works 100hrs/week for three years to get a thesis to market, they will comfortably find themselves out the door with a firm boot mark in thier butt as thier only asset remaining from the company. Don't worry, big money can commit finnancial crimes like fraud and collusion and not be held accountable so forcing the deplorables out won't have to be by the books. The true visionaries are the venture capitalists who will take that technology and make it into something truly profitable to the right people, who ultimately deserve, no - are entitled to it.
It's the American inventors modern nightma^h^h^h^h^h^h dream.