China's ACCEL chip, developed by Tsinghua University, is claimed to be 3000 times faster than Nvidia's A100 GPU and has 4000 million times higher energy efficiency.
The chip leverages photonic and analog computing in a specialized architecture, delivering over 3000 times the performance of the Nvidia A100 at an energy consumption that's four million times lower.
ACCEL can perform 4.6 trillion operations per second in vision tasks, which is a significant improvement compared to Nvidia's A100.
The chip has shown high accuracy levels in various computer vision applications, including Fashion-MNIST, 3-class ImageNet classification, and time-lapse video recognition tasks.
ACCEL operates through diffractive optical analog computing (OAC) and electronic analog computing (EAC), with 99% of its operation implemented within the optical system.
The photonic, optical system of ACCEL reduces energy requirements and waste heat, resulting in higher energy efficiency compared to digital systems like Nvidia's GPU.
The chip's low computing latency and high throughput make it suitable for real-time applications.
ACCEL is considered an analog rendition of an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) design, with the electronic analog computing (EAC) unit reconfiguring analog pathways to accelerate specific tasks.
The development of ACCEL represents a significant achievement in computing architecture for the AI era, with potential practical applications in various fields.
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