Vision and neural nets drive demand for more powerful chips

New applications are driving demand for faster and more efficient vision processing. The Hot Chips conference, now in its 28th year, is known for announcements of "big iron" such as the Power and SPARC chips behind some of the world's fastest systems. But these days the demand for processing power is coming from new places. One of the big ones is vision processing, driven by the proliferation of cameras; new applications in cars, phones and all sorts of "things;" and the rapid progress in neural networks for object recognition. All of this takes a lot of horsepower, and at this week's conference, several companies talked about different ways to tackle it.