Future of Chips: Google’s TPU and Diamond Computer Chips
Silicon chips are at the core of every device in this modern era. Many technological innovations we use regularly have integrated silicon chips in them. Computer chips, sensors and other IC chips all are fabricated using a silicon chip derived from a silicon wafer. The rapid pace of the development in these silicon industries and their great innovations never fail to astonish.
When I heard about google is fabricating a new custom chip for machine learning system, I was excited. One would ask, why? This chip is not just another chip faster than any other chip in the world, it is way too different. Google has not revealed much information about the said chip but it is expected to be utilized in their upcoming major projects which involve Artificial Intelligence and Cloud.
This breakthrough technology innovation is called TPU or Tensor Processing Unit and being used to power Google’s data centers from almost a year. This new custom chip is more efficient and can perform many operations per second than the conventional chips.
“TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly. A board with a TPU fits into a hard disk drive slot in our data center racks.” – Google Cloud Platform blog
Google is utilizing the speed for gaining a cutting edge in the future of technology. They are decades ahead of others in thinking about the future innovations and investing into them. Google is ambitious to lead the Industry with machine learning technology which has unimaginable scope in the future.
The tech industry is rapidly progressing with fast chips and one such innovation that I came across last week was Diamond computer chips. Yes, you heard it right. Diamonds! I was taken back due to many questions nagging at my brain.
Questions like does diamond conduct electricity? Will the diamond computer chip be affordable? How efficient this new product is? And so on.
The Diamond computer chips which are running at 100 GHz are being demonstrated by Akhan Semiconductors. This company aims to enter quantum computer field by using their own propriety techniques which are guarded secrets for now.
A semiconductor designed with diamond instead of silicon can run five times hotter and deliver a million times more electrical current. Diamond chips could make devices smaller and lighter, while also saving energy.” – Nextbigfuture
Diamond is “Ultimate Wide Bandgap Semiconductor” material due to its properties which surpasses the ability to conduct heat of the current used materials on chips such as copper and silicon. Diamond is five times better than copper and 22 times better than silicon due to its nature.
Times have changed and so much that the possibility to teleport a person from one place to another across the globe might be two decades away from now. Who knows? But one thing I am sure about is that companies are racing against time to innovate and develop things which are beyond our imagination.
SOURCE: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-chips-googles-tpu-diamond-computer-harsha-vardhan
