Google AI designs chips to make AI more efficient

摘要

ENGINEERS at Google have tasked an artificial intelligence with designing faster and more efficient processors - and then used its chip design to develop the next generation of computers that run the very same type of AI algorithms. One stage of chip design is called floorplanning, which involves taking the finalised circuit diagram of a new chip and arranging the millions of components into an efficient layout for manufacturing. Although the functional design of the chip is complete at this point, the layout can have a huge effect on speed and power consumption. Floorplanning has previously been a highly manual and time-consuming task, says Anna Goldie at Google. Teams would split larger chips into blocks and work on parts in parallel, fiddling around to find small refinements, she says. But Goldie and her colleagues have used a neural network to take a different approach, treating a blank chip and its millions of components as a jigsaw with a vast amount of possible solutions.