Can the US Military Re-Invent the Microchip for the AI Era?
Can the US Military Re-Invent the Microchip for the AI
Era?
BY PATRICK TUCKER 10:36 AM ET
As conventional microchip design reaches its limits,
DARPA is pouring money into the specialty chips that might power tomorrow’s
autonomous machines.
The coming AI revolution faces a big hurdle: today’s
microchips.
It’s one thing to get a bunch of transistors on an
integrated circuit to crunch numbers, even very large ones. But what the brain
does is far more difficult. Processing vast amounts of visual data for use by
huge, multi-cellular organism is very different from the narrow calculations of
conventional math. The algorithms that will drive tomorrow’s autonomous cars,
planes, and programs will be incredibly data-intensive, with needs well beyond
what conventional chips were ever designed for. This is one reason for the hype
surrounding quantum computing and neurosynaptic chips.
That challenge has a sister predicament: the end of
Moore’s Law. The integrated circuit revolution that gave birth to the modern
computer, smartphone, and basically all of Silicon Valley is in its twilight.
In the 1960s, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors per square
inch on integrated circuits was doubling roughly 18 months. That won’t be true
after 2020, according to Robert Colwell, formerly of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, or DARPA
That poses a big problem for the Defense Department. In
2014, Defense One asked DARPA director Arati Prabhakar about it:
“There’s a $300 billion-a-year global semiconductor
industry that cares deeply about the answer of what comes next,” Prabhakar
said. Apple, for example, is said to be working on a processor devoted
specifically to AI-related tasks. But DARPA has money in the game as well, The
magic of the integrated circuit — the reason why it will be so hard to replace
— is that it was “a computational unit that you could use to do the broadest
possible class of problems,” she said. The way forward will be building chips
for specific purposes. “If you’re willing to work on specialized classes of
problems, you can actually get a lot more out of specialized architectures,”
she said. “Special architectures will give us many more steps forward.”
Bottom line: there is no silver-bullet replacement for
the integrated circuit on the horizon. But you could achieve something Moore’s
Law-like by creating chips that could crunch lots of a specific type of data.
Some of these already exist; they’re called application-specific integrated
circuit chips, or ASICs.
On Wednesday, DARPA announced several new next-generation
chip design initiatives meant to build off that approach.
One, Software Defined Hardware, seeks “a
hardware/software system that allows data-intensive algorithms to run at near
ASIC efficiency without the cost, development time or single application
limitations associated with ASIC development.”
A second program, Domain-Specific System on a Chip, takes
a dual approach, letting architects “mix and match general purpose, special
purpose (e.g., ASICs), and hardware accelerator coprocessors, as well as memory
and [input/output] elements, into easily programmed [system on a chip] for
applications within specific technology domains.”
In many ways, the premise of the program comes again from
Moore’s 1965 paper. In this case, it’s his observation that, eventually, “the
matching and tracking of similar components in integrated structures will allow
the design of differential amplifiers of greatly improved performance.”
“With an eye toward the times we now live in, he laid out
the technical directions to explore when the conditions under which scaling
will be the primary means for advancement are no longer met,” DARPA program
managers observed in the Broad Agency
Announcement for “Page Three Investments” — an allusion to the actual page in
Moore’s paper where the ideas first appear.
The two programs join several others in the Electronics
Resurgence Initiative, a $216 million effort to create chip designs for 2030 to
2050.
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