GPUs have sparked advances in AI boom

Seth Larweh Kodjiku
unpack
Published in
2 min readOct 18, 2020
A GPU processor mounted on a mother board

In recent times, the rise of AI-related tasks has sparked the need for high-performance processors and as AI frameworks become more advanced and sophisticated, they require more computation power from the hardware for their assigned task.
To achieve these requirements, there is the need for a processor specifically designed for AI-related tasks to accelerate the training and execution of neural networks and also lessen power consumption.

GPUs and CPUs may have the same physical appearance however their proposed reasons for existing are unique. Their value is dependent upon the assigned task.
Generally, GPUs and CPUs are chips manufactured from silicon that are capable of producing results from mathematical equation tasks. The distinctions lie in the way they approach their tasks. Due to the nature of AI tasks, there is the need for an AI hardware which varies from the general hardware we are used to.

AI Hardware
Basically, when we talk about AI hardware, we allude to some type of AI accelerators, a class of microchips or microprocessors, intended to empower faster processing of AI applications particularly in machine learning, computer vision and neural network.
They are normally designed as many core and spotlight on arithmetic of low precision, in-memory computing capability, and novel dataflow models.

The thought behind AI accelerators is that a huge part of AI tasks can be enormously parallel. With a general-purpose GPU, for instance, a graphics card can be utilized in enormously parallel computing usage, where they convey up to 10 times the CPU’s performance.

For a long time, GPUs have been the main backbone of pictures and motions displays on computer system displays, yet they are technically equipped for accomplishing more. Graphics processors are brought into play when huge computations are required on a single task.

As the requirement for computational resources to process the most up to date software takes off exponentially, the industry awaits another age of AI chip that would have new capabilities such as more computational power and cost-efficiency.
New silicon models must be adjusted to support cloud and edge computing and also provide faster insights to be useful for businesses and AI solutions.
New exploration is made to move from conventional silicon to do optical computing chips creating optical computing systems that are a lot faster than traditional CPUs or GPUs.

Prior to making purchases on AI hardware, organizations should know how various kinds of hardware suit various requirements. These days, with the move towards purpose-make chips, you would prefer not to spend a huge amount of money on specialized hardware that isn’t needed.
Settling on a broadly useful chip like GPUs, more specialized solutions, as TPU or VPUs, or searching for more creative designs offered by promising new companies relies on the AI tasks a business needs.

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Seth Larweh Kodjiku
Seth Larweh Kodjiku