A New ASIC for AI

Anytime the new cool thing comes around, all the cool engineers have to figure out the best ways to make it work. And we embark on a natural progression – or perhaps succession is a better word – sort of the way a depression along a river changes from pond to wetland to meadow. In general, you can get either performance or one or both of the other two. The thing is, though, that, if the best way to do the new thing isn't known yet, then you're likely to settle for something suboptimal for the sake of flexibility, figuring it out as you go, and perhaps fixing it after it's deployed in the field. After that, you might move to hardware of the flexible sort: FPGAs.