Nvidia's GPU-powered AI is creating chips with 'better than human design'

Nvidia has been quick to hop on the artificial intelligence bus一with many of its consumer facing technologies, such as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) (opens in new tab) and AI-accelerated denoising exemplifying that. However, it has also found many uses for AI in its silicon development process and, as Nvidia's chief scientist Bill Dally (opens in new tab) said in a GTC conference, even designing new hardware. Dally outlines a few use cases for AI in its own development process of the latest and greatest graphic cards (opens in new tab) (among other things), as noted by HPC Wire (opens in new tab). "It's natural as an expert in AI that we would want to take that AI and use it to design better chips," Dally says. "We do this in a couple of different ways. The first and most obvious way is we can take existing computer-aided design tools that we have. For example, we have one that takes a map of where power is used in our GPUs, and predicts how far the voltage grid drops一what's called IR drop for current times resistance drop. Running this on a conventional CAD tool takes three hours."