EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – Esperanto

2018 saw an explosion of innovation in the chip industry – a level of excitement and innovation last seen during the mid-90s RISC processor revolution – driven by huge market disruptions in artificial intelligence (AI) and the advent of open standard Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) such as RISC-V. These disruptions spurred an avalanche of funding, with hundreds of millions of dollars in new chip-related VC investments, to serve the projected $50+ billion AI chip market.

In 2019, we predict that ever more innovative AI applications will emerge, and that AI processing will move from first-generation solutions such as CPUs and GPUs to domain-optimized AI accelerator chips designed specifically for machine-learning algorithms. They will feature higher performance, reduced cost, and  superior energy efficiency of typically ten times better than GPUs and 100 times better than CPUs. They will be scalable, and cover a much wider range of cost and power points.

Also, the software stack will evolve with accelerator-optimizing compilers that optimize models from a range of frameworks, such as Facebook’s open source Glow compiler, beginning to supplant current proprietary offerings. With these solutions, most of the world’s AI processing will shift from legacy platforms to optimized solutions as quickly as the new silicon can be manufactured.

The creation and growth of these new markets will create a new set of winners and losers in the chip and processor world. While we are decades away from achieving the full potential of AI processing, the AI chips of 2019 will lay the foundation for future generations of cognitive cooperation between people and computers, and a new era of silicon innovation.

Tags: accelerator-optimizing compilers, AI accelerator, ISA, Predictions

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