NovuMind: An Early AI Chip Startup

Last fall, a bit of nerdy controversy arose around AI chip startup NovuMind when the company announced its first low-power chip for processing neural networks. The company claimed that its patented design could natively process 3-D tensor data far more efficiently than other designs that require pre-processing the 3D tensors into 2D matrices. NovuMind portrayed its advantages in low-resolution and high-resolution environments, while typical (Resnet 50) benchmarks target medium resolution algorithms common in datacenters (where NovuMind has a smaller advantage). Now, recent customer wins and trial deployments may provide the trump card in the debate. Let's take a look at the company, its first product, and some case studies that seem to bear out NovuMind's dramatic performance/watt claims.