2019 Agenda

12:15 | Tuesday 10th December 2019

New Compute Architectures Advancing Edge Capabilities

Format: Edge Economics

Couple some local intelligence to each sensor and the internet of things is becoming the sensory cortex of the planet, with countless data-collecting-devices. All of this ‘big data’ would be a big headache but for machine learning to find patterns to make it actionable, and edge computing to shift the processing to the periphery and avoid network overload. In short, the edge needs AI, and AI needs the edge.  The compute architecture for machine intelligence is shifting to specialized processors optimized to the task, a biomimicry of the human cortex in compute substrate and algorithms.  We are also learning how to improve the process of training with model compression and continuous learning.

The march to specialized silicon, from CPU to GPU to FPGA to ASIC is now going further, to analog and quantum processing. At a high level, we are recapitulating our evolutionary computational march in silicon, and an ever-growing percentage of our compute will be massively parallel and in-memory processing, just like our cortex.