Move over CPUs and GPUs, the Intelligence Processing Unit is the super-smart chip of the future

"What we heard universally was that current hardware was holding developers back," says Nigel Toon, co-founder of Graphcore, the Bristol-based startup behind a new chip to help speed up the process-hogging, resource-intensive deployment of AI. By using cloud computing and vast datasets, some neural networks function sufficiently well. The more powerful AI systems in development, however, struggle to process complex rapid-fire calculations at speed if using computer processing units (CPUs) which work sequentially. Latency, in other words, has slowed. "For 70 years we have programmed computers to work on instructions step-by-step," says Toon, 54.