AI Accelerators -- Part II: Transistors and Pizza (or: Why Do We Need Accelerators)?

We arrived at the key motivator of the entire series; a fundamental question often asked by venture capitalists when being pitched for a new startup or executives when being pitched for a new project: "why now?" To answer that, we will have a crash course on the history of processors and what significant changes the industry underwent in recent years. Simplistically speaking, the processor is the part of the computer system in charge of the actual computing of numbers. It receives user input data (represented as numerics) and generates new data per the user's request, i.e., as reflected by the set of arithmetic operations the user wishes to perform. The processor employs its arithmetic units to generate the computation result, which means running the program. Processors were commoditized in personal computers in the 1980s.