IBM's New Do-It-All Deep Learning Chip

The field of deep learning is still in flux, but some things have started to settle out. In particular, experts recognize that neural nets can get a lot of computation done with little energy if a chip approximates an answer using low-precision math. But some tasks, especially training a neural net to do something, still need precision. IBM recently revealed its newest solution, still a prototype, at the IEEE VLSI Symposia: a chip that does both equally well. The disconnect between the needs of training a neural net and having that net execute its function, called inference, has been one of the big challenges for those designing chips that accelerate AI functions.