Ren Wu’s blog

Disrupting the Giants

As we get close to launching our first chip, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is, “How will you guys compete against other AI chips, including those from giant companies like Intel and Nvidia?”  It’s a question I love, because it leads to some great discussions around computing architectures, chip design, and how AI will be deployed to improve peoples’ lives. These can all be lengthy discussions, but for this post let me just focus on some of the design considerations that have led NovuMind to a unique, disruptive approach. We are just at the beginning of an AI revolution, brought about by Deep Neural Networks. As this revolution unfolds, it is not surprising that there are many design approaches, building on existing technologies. The processing units that power most of today’s DNN solutions are CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs.  These are all derivatives of the von Neumann model, based on the concept of executing a computer instruction set, able to execute loops, subroutines, arithmetic functions, and so on. But DNNs are forcing us to think about processor architectures in new ways. DNNs are not organized around the traditional instruction set model. They are more about interconnected layers…More DetailsDisrupting the Giants