Dual 8-bit breakthroughs bring AI to the edge

This week, at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), IBM researchers will showcase new hardware that will take AI further than it’s been before: right to the edge. Our novel approaches for digital and analog AI chips boost speed and slash energy demand for deep learning, without sacrificing accuracy. On the digital side, we’re setting the stage for a new industry standard in AI training with an approach that achieves full accuracy with eight-bit precision, accelerating training time by two to four times over today’s systems. On the analog side, we report eight-bit precision—the highest yet—for an analog chip, roughly doubling accuracy compared with previous analog chips while consuming 33x less energy than a digital architecture of similar precision. These achievements herald a new era of computing hardware designed to unleash the full potential of AI.