Top Seven AI Chips that Made a Breakthrough in 2020
AI chips are microprocessors that are specifically designed to process AI tasks faster, using less power.
In the era of modern technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought a revolutionary change in every sector. When we take autonomous cars, smartphones, electronic devices, or robotics into consideration, the mechanism behind every bit of it relies on the AI chip. AI chips also called AI hardware or AI accelerator are specifically designed accelerators for artificial neural network (ANN) based applications. AI chips refer to the new generation of microprocessors which are specifically designed to process AI tasks faster, using less power. AI chips could play a critical role in economic growth going forward because they will inevitably feature in tech-devices. AI chips are changing the world of computing, including their current size, future developments, and their advantages. Henceforth, GlobalTech Outlook brings you a list of AI chips that stole the stage in 2020.
Top seven AI chips that acted as frontrunners in 2020
In 2020, Qualcomm announced its Cloud AI100, an AI chip promising strong performance and power efficiency to enable artificial intelligence in cloud edge computing, autonomous vehicles and 5G infrastructures. The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 addresses unique requirements in the cloud, including power efficiency, scale, process node advancements and signal processing.
Apple’s A14 Bionic is the world’s first commercially produced chipset that is based on 5nm node technology, which gives it a huge advantage over the Android counterparts. Apple claims that it can even go head-to-head against some computer CPUs. The new A14 Bionic chip will deliver an almost a 40% performance boost over the A12 Bionic chip that featured in last generation’s iPad Air.
Nvidia unveiled its A100 AI chip in 2020, which the CEO Jensen Huang called as the ultimate instrument for advancing AI. The chip has a monstrous 54 billion transistors (the on-off switches that are the building blocks of all things electronic), and it can execute five petaflops of performance or about 20 times more than the previous-generation chip Volta. The Nvidia A100 chip uses the same Ampere architecture that could be used in consumer applications such as Nvidia’s GeForce graphics chips.
Arm Holdings, the UK-based company, has released Arm Cortex M55 processor this year. Cortex M55 is the latest in Arm’s line of microcontrollers that is relatively of low-cost and is a power-efficient chip that is used to run sensors and perform simple computational tasks in everything from automobile engines to remote-controlled toys to power tools.
Advanced Micro Devices has launched the AMD Instinct MI100, a new graphics processing unit (GPU) that plays a specialized role as an accelerator for scientific research computing. The 7-nanometer GPU accelerator uses AMD’s CDNA architecture to handle high-performance computing (HPC) and AI processing so scientists can work on heavy-duty computing tasks, such as coronavirus research.
Baidu, the Chinese internet powerhouse has partnered with Samsung Electronics for its first cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence chip Baidu Kunlun. The Kunlun chip is built based on Baidu’s advanced XPU, which is a neural processor architecture Baidu independently developed for cloud, edge, and AI scenarios. The chip is made with Samsung’s 14-nanometer fabrication technology and Interposer-Cube package solution.
Intel, the California-based company, has started selling its new chip Keem Bay for on-device artificial intelligence in 2020. The chip can handle trillions of operations per second without burning through battery life. The chip is part of Intel’s line of vision processing units (VPUs), which are designed for on-device deep learning. Intel allegedly said that the chip offers more than five times the energy efficiency of graphics processing units (GPUs) and other chips eyeing edge AI.
