China’s analogue AI chip runs 12 times as fast on 1/200th the energy of digital rivals

A radically different kind of chip created by Chinese researchers can now handle real-world data tasks, potentially reshaping artificial intelligence systems’ reliance on power-hungry digital processors, its developers said.

Building on work reported in October, the Peking University team’s ultra-fast, energy-efficient analogue chip has moved beyond solving basic mathematical problems and can now power applications such as personalised recommendation and image processing.

In a paper published on Monday by the journal Nature Communications, lead author Sun Zhong and his colleagues said the chip achieved a 12-fold speed increase over advanced digital processors, while improving energy efficiency by more than 200 times.

These results were based on the training of recommendation systems using data sets that were comparable in scale to those of Netflix and Yahoo, according to the peer-reviewed paper.

In image-compression tests, the system reconstructed images with almost the same visual quality as full-precision digital computing, while cutting storage requirements by half, the researchers wrote.

In a social media post, Sun wrote that the study “pushes the boundary of analogue computing one step further”. He added that the new chip had handled more complex tasks while retaining the speed and energy advantages of analogue computing.

South China Morning Post