IBM Research Wants to Have Next-Gen AI Chips Ready When Watson Needs Them

IBM wants to develop next-generation artificial intelligence chips, and it's building a new AI research center and partnering with academia and other tech companies to do it. At the recently announced future AI Hardware Center at SUNY Polytechnical Institute in Albany, New York, IBM researchers will collaborate with academic researchers and tech partners to develop, prototype, and test new AI chips and systems. Initial partners include Samsung, Mellanox Technologies, Synopsis, Applied Materials, and Tokyo Electron. Related: Intel Steps Up Its Challenge to Nvidia's AI Chip Dominance, with Facebook's Help The IBM Research division, which has designed several prototypes of its Digital AI cores and Analog AI cores in recent years, will continue to develop these chips at the center, Jeff Burns, IBM Research's director of AI Compute and director of the future AI Hardware Center, said. These new processors are expected to result in a 1,000-times improvement in AI compute performance efficiency over the next 10 years.