World's 1st non-binary AI chip enters production: What's so special?
What's the story
China has begun mass production of the world's first non-binary artificial intelligence (AI) chip.
The revolutionary technology combines binary and stochastic (property of being described by a random probability distribution) logic, overcoming traditional computing limitations.
The project is led by Professor Li Hongge's team at Beihang University in Beijing, and integrates China's proprietary hybrid computing technology into key sectors such as aviation and industrial systems.
Technological breakthrough
Addressing power wall and architecture wall
The non-binary AI chip addresses two major challenges in today's chip technologies: the power wall and the architecture wall.
The power wall is a contradiction where binary systems, while efficient at carrying information, consume a lot of power.
Meanwhile, the architecture wall arises from new non-silicon chips' inability to seamlessly communicate with traditional systems based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOS).
Innovative approach
Enabling fault tolerance and power efficiency
To tackle these challenges, Li's team proposed a new numerical system called the Hybrid Stochastic Number (HSN).
This innovative method combines traditional binary numbers with stochastic or probability-based numbers.
The non-binary AI chip's unique architecture allows unprecedented fault tolerance and power efficiency in intelligent control applications like touch displays and flight systems, all while circumventing US chip restrictions.
Architecture
It has an SoC design
Besides HSN, the non-binary chip uses in-memory computing algorithms.
These lower the energy-intensive data that shuttle between memory and processors in normal architectures, hence improving overall efficiency.
It also flaunts a system-on-chip (SoC) design, integrating many types of computing units in order to handle multiple tasks in parallel.
This breaks it free from the limits of traditional homogeneous architectures.