It's our first complete system-on-chip designed to run and train deep learning models faster and more efficiently than a general-purpose CPU. A decade ago, modern AI was born. A team of academic researchers showed that with millions of photos and days of brute force computation, a deep learning model could be trained to identify objects and animals in entirely new images. Today, deep learning has evolved from classifying pictures of cats and dogs to translating languages, detecting tumors in medical scans, and performing thousands of other time-saving tasks. AI models are growing exponentially, but the hardware to train these behemoths and run them on servers in the cloud or on edge devices like smartphones and sensors hasn't advanced as quickly.

A decade ago, modern AI was born. A team of academic researchers showed that with millions of photos and days of brute force computation, a deep learning model could be trained to identify objects and animals in entirely new images. Today, deep learning has evolved from classifying pictures of cats and dogs to translating languages, detecting tumors in medical scans, and performing thousands of other time-saving tasks. AI models are growing exponentially, but the hardware to train these behemoths and run them on servers in the cloud or on edge devices like smartphones and sensors hasn't advanced as quickly. That's why the IBM Research AI Hardware Center decided to create a specialized computer chip for AI.

Big Blue has unveiled Telum, its first chip with AI inferencing acceleration that will allow it to conduct tasks such as fraud detection while a transaction is occurring. "The chip contains 8 processor cores with a deep super-scalar out-of-order instruction pipeline, running with more than 5GHz clock frequency, optimised for the demands of heterogenous enterprise-class workloads," IBM said. The increasing scale of AI is raising the stakes for major ethical questions. "The completely redesigned cache and chip-interconnection infrastructure provides 32MB cache per core, and can scale to 32 Telum chips. The dual-chip module design contains 22 billion transistors and 19 miles of wire on 17 metal layers."

In a major refresh of its Z Series chips, IBM is adding on-chip AI acceleration capabilities to allow enterprise customers to perform deep learning inferencing while transactions are taking place to capture business insights and fight fraud in real-time. IBM is set to unveil the latest Z chip Aug. 23 today (Monday) at the annual Hot Chips 33 conference, which is being held virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The company provided advance details in a media pre-briefing last week. This will be the first Z chip, used in IBM's System Z mainframes, that won't follow a traditional numeric naming pattern used in the past. Instead of following the previous z15 chip with a z16 moniker, the new processor is being called IBM Telum (telum is Latin for javelin).