DAMO Academy, the research and development arm of Alibaba, are reportedly working on a new neural network chip (NPU). It appears as though this chip, called the Ali-NPU, will be for image analysis, machine learning as well as other AI reasoning calculations.

The Ali-NPU when launched will be capable of an expected price-to-performance ratio 40 times better than current AI chips. It can achieve this as it performs 10 times better than current CPU-based AI chips while needing just half the manufacturing cost and power consumption.

The usual issue with AI chips out of CPU or GPU chips is that they have a high power consumption. These are general-purpose computing chips, not meant to solely deal with AI computing issues. Assuming Alibaba’s Ali-NPU succeeds, it may be a huge breakthrough for consumer AI.

Alibaba, which operates the world’s largest e-commerce platform, started up the DAMO Academy back in 2017; if the Ali-NPU does what it’s expected of, it seems as though the investment was worth it.

(Source: Asia Times)