Media365
The computing chips that power artificial intelligence consume a lot of electricity. On Wednesday, the world’s biggest manufacturer of those chips showed off a new strategy to make them more energy efficient: using AI-powered software to design them.
Nvidia’s current flagship AI servers, for example, can consume as much as 1,200 watts during demanding tasks, which would be the equivalent of the power used by 1,000 US homes if run continuously.
The gains TSMC is hoping to achieve come from a new generation of chip designs in which multiple “chiplets” – smaller pieces of full computing chips – using different technologies are packaged together to make one computing package.
For some of the complex tasks in designing chips, the tools from TSMC’s software partners found better solutions than TSMC’s own human engineers – and did so much faster.
