The Different Types Of Hardware AI Accelerators

An AI accelerator is a kind of specialised hardware accelerator or computer system created to accelerate artificial intelligence apps, particularly artificial neural networks, machine learning, robotics, and other data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks. They usually have novel designs and typically focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures or in-memory computing capability. As deep learning and artificial intelligence workloads grew in prominence in the last decade, specialised hardware units were designed or adapted from existing products to accelerate these tasks, and to have parallel high-throughput systems for workstations targeted at various applications, including neural network simulations. As of 2018, a typical AI integrated circuit chip contains billions of MOSFET transistors. Hardware acceleration has many advantages, the main being speed. Accelerators can greatly decrease the amount of time it takes to train and execute an AI model, and can also be used to execute special AI-based tasks that cannot be conducted on a CPU.