Nvidia: Eight bits ought to be enough for anybody ... doing AI

Analysis Nvidia has designed a couple of new Tesla processors for AI applications – the P4 and the P40 – and is talking up their 8-bit math performance. The 16nm FinFET GPUs use Nv's Pascal architecture and follow on from the P100 launched in June. The P4 fits on a half-height, half-length PCIe card for scale-out servers, while the beefier P40 has its eyes set on scale-up boxes. The new pair are aimed mainly at inference work, ie: you give the hardware a trained AI model, some suitable software, and input data like video from a camera or sound from a microphone, and it spits out decisions, speech-to-text translations, object classifications, and so on. We've reached the stage now where deep-learning models are so elaborate – having being constructed on powerful systems using mountains of training data – that the inference side has to catch up: you need a decent number-crunching processor to push information through a complex neural network to make decisions in real time.