Artificial Intelligence Chips

In News: The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips has risen, with chipmakers designing different types of these chips to power AI applications

What are AI chips?

• AI chips are built with specific architecture and have integrated AI acceleration to support deep learning-based applications.
• These chips, with their hardware architectures and complementary packaging, memory, storage and interconnect technologies, make it possible to infuse AI into a broad spectrum of applications to help turn data into information and then into knowledge
• There are different types of AI chips such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs, designed for diverse AI applications.

How are they different from traditional chips?

• When traditional chips, containing processor cores and memory, perform computational tasks, they continuously move commands and data between the two hardware components
• These chips, however, are not ideal for AI applications as they would not be able to handle higher computational necessities of AI workloads which have huge volumes of data.
• Although, some of the higher-end traditional chips may be able to process certain AI applications
• In comparison, AI chips generally contain processor cores as well as several AI-optimised cores (depending on the scale of the chip) that are designed to work in harmony when performing computational tasks.
• The AI cores are optimised for the demands of heterogeneous enterprise-class AI workloads with low-latency inferencing, due to close integration with the other processor cores, which are designed to handle non-AI applications.

What are their applications?

• AI chips are used for a multitude of smart machines and devices, including ones that are said to deliver the performance of a data centre-class computer to edge devices.
• Some of these chips support in-vehicle computers to run state-of-the-art AI applications more efficiently.
• AI chips are also powering applications of computational imaging in wearable electronics, drones, and robots.
• The use of AI chips for NLP (Natural Language Processing) applications has increased due to the rise in demand for chatbots and online channels such as Messenger, Slack, and others.
• They use NLP to analyse user messages and conversational logic.

Previous Year Questions (PYQs)

Q.1) With the present state of development, Artificial Intelligence can effectively do which of the following? (2020)

1. Bring down electricity consumption in industrial units
2. Create meaningful short stories and songs
3. Disease diagnosis
4. Text-to-Speech Conversion
5. Wireless transmission of electrical energy

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

1. 1, 2, 3 and 5 only
2. 1, 3 and 4 only
3. 2, 4 and 5 only
4. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

Source: The Hindu