IBM Invests In AI Hardware

While the IBM hardware business today is limited to POWER and Mainframe chips and systems, the technology giant is quietly building its expertise and capabilities in AI hardware. Where this could end up is anybody's guess, but here are a few thoughts about what IBM is doing and speculation as to why. IBM founded the IBM Research AI Hardware Center in early 2019 to conduct AI Chip research in collaboration with the New York State, the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and technology companies including Mellanox, Samsung and Synopsys. The center takes a holistic, end-to-end approach to AI hardware, working towards its aggressive goal to deliver a 1000X increase in AI performance over the next 10 years. This starts with the reduced precision techniques we will discuss here.