AI chips – what makes them important?

Just a look around and you realize how prominent Artificial Intelligence has emerged out to be. Be it in the form of facial recognition cameras or voice assistants, AI has achieved it all. This has paved the way for curiosity pertaining to what exactly is an AI chip and what makes it different from other chips. Also, the fact that the AI chip market is highly valued is all the more a strong factor as to why should one know about AI chips.

First things first, AI chips are specialized silicon chips, which incorporate AI technology and are used for machine learning. One of the prime reasons why organizations rely on AI chips heavily is because of the growing need for more efficient systems to solve mathematical and computational problems. Additionally, the humungous volume of data also calls for an efficient way to compute the problems. Thus, the major key players focusing on developing AI chips and applications come as no big a surprise. Well, there is more to this. The emergence of quantum computing as well as an increase in the implementation of AI chips in the field of robotics has driven the growth of the global artificial intelligence chip market intensively.

AI chips are specially designed accelerators for artificial neural network (ANN) based applications. ANN is that field of artificial intelligence that includes layers of artificial neurons which are mathematical functions inspired by how human neurons work. Talking about the hardware infrastructure of an AI chip, it has three parts – computing, storage and networking. As far as the advantages of AI chips over other general-purpose hardware is concerned, then one cannot go without mentioning faster computation by virtue of AI chips. In addition to this, the fact that specialized AI hardware has high bandwidth memory cannot be overlooked upon.

Some of the most impacting factors behind the artificial intelligence chip market are – development of smart cities, an increase in the demand for smart homes, the emergence of quantum computing, a huge rise in the investments in AI-related start-ups, and a lack of a skilled workforce. These factors together are all set to fuel the AI chip market.

Now, throwing light on the main topic of interest – what makes AI chips important as of today? Well, it has become very evident that deep neural network-powered solutions make up most commercial AI applications. Not just that – both the importance as well as the number of these applications has seen exponential growth over the years and the same trend is likely to continue in the future as well. All this ultimately paves the way for a whopping rise in the whole market revenue in the coming days.

The next question to address is – what is the criteria to be followed in assessing AI hardware? There is always an option of relying on cloud providers for this but this isn't favorable at all times as all of this process is associated with huge costs. As far as initial testing is concerned, one can definitely rely on the cloud.

Ultimately, what everything boils down to is – AI is growing rapidly and is becoming a big part of our lives swiftly, both at home and at work. In the midst of all this, development in the AI chip space will be rapid to accommodate our immense reliance on technology.