Highlights

• Artificial Intelligence Unit
• IBM Research
• System-on-Chip Design

In Brief

International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation is a name that everyone is familiar with, which is one of the biggest multinational tech corporation not just in America but throughout the globe, with its operations in more than 170 countries, which is enough to speak of its stature.

It has come out with many creative and innovative discoveries in the tech field for many years and continues to grow in terms of relevance with each passing day, apart from providing many employment opportunities to youngsters.

Software engineers and tech savvy individuals that have a flare for electronic gadgets and their learning constantly aspire to work in IBM as many of them consider it a privilege of working in such a massive tech giant and earn rich dividends, aside from learning new things every now and then.

People that aspire to showcase their software skills find IBM to be one of the best platforms where they can show their creativity and innovation in the field of technology and electronics in more ways than one.

The latest news going about is that IBM Research has introduced an Artificial Intelligence Unit (AIU), which is being termed as a system-on-chip that is designed to work in a more efficient manner than a General- Purpose Compact Processing Unit (CPU).

The era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just around the corner, while some academicians feel it is upon us and the full credit goes to the constant toil that researchers went through for more than a decade that played a key role in developing contemporary AI that we know of today.

The researchers that have been working on AI for quite some time now have concluded that it is important to train a deep learning model so that humans, animals, and inanimate objects can be recognized in new images, which requires days and weeks of brute-force computing over millions of such images.

Deep learning has now expanded from being a mere model for image recognition to now doing hundreds of other necessary activities, some of which include language translation, finding X-Ray malignancies, among others, whereas earlier it was confined to identify images of animals and objects.

There have been certain breakthroughs in the AI field since the past few years although they all have their own problems like computational power, which is one of the prominent ones that requires looking into.

This is why IBM Research AI Hardware Center is toiling hard for creating a strong and dedicated computer AI chip for which its research has been groundbreaking. The tech giant has named the chip Artificial Intelligence Unit (AIU).

CPU has been a mainstay when it comes to traditional computing even though there have been significant transformations in deep learning models that have given rise to computing in its present state, while applications for general-purpose software suits well to the flexibility of CPUs.

It needs to be mentioned that deep learning models have been used for rendering video game graphics on GPUs and CPUs for more than a decade even though the processor is used for various purposes like optimization of the numerous vector and matrix multiplication operations required in deep learning.

IBM has also revealed that the AI Chip was not created from the scratch and is simply a scaled down version of an AI accelerator like Telum processor from IBM, while there is are 32 cores in the AIU that resemble AI core in the latest z16 system chip from Telum.

Conclusion

It is well known that IBM has been working on this chip for a considerable amount of time, which can sometimes lead to an increase in costs and labour for developing and maintaining the deep learning models so to manage things smoothly, IBM had established the AI Hardware Center in 2019.

Now with the creation of AIU, IBM is very close to accomplishing its goal and hopes to create AI models that are thousand times quicker by 2029 for which it has created a blueprint so that it is completed on time.

Also Read: IBM’s Client Innovation Centre in Mysuru launched