By Christopher Mims
During modern computing's first epoch, one trend reigned
supreme: Moore's Law.
Actually a prediction by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore
rather than any sort of physical law, Moore's Law held that the
number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. It
also meant that performance of those chips -- and the computers
they powered -- increased by a substantial amount on roughly the
same timetable. This formed the industry's core, the glowing
crucible from which sprang trillion-dollar technologies that
upended almost every aspect of our day-to-day existence.
As chip makers have reached the limits of atomic-scale circuitry
and the physics of electrons, Moore's law has slowed, and some say
it's over. But a different law, potentially no less consequential
for computing's next half century, has arisen.
I call it Huang's Law, after Nvidia Corp. chief executive and
co-founder Jensen Huang. It describes how the silicon chips that
power artificial intelligence more than double in performance every
two years. While the increase can be attributed to both hardware
and software, its steady progress makes it a unique enabler of
everything from autonomous cars, trucks and ships to the face,
voice and object recognition in our personal gadgets.
Between November 2012 and this May, performance of Nvidia's
chips increased 317 times for an important class of AI
calculations, says Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice
president of research at Nvidia. On average, in other words, the
performance of these chips more than doubled every year, a rate of
progress that makes Moore's Law pale in comparison.
Nvidia's specialty has long been graphics processing units, or
GPUs, which operate efficiently when there are many independent
tasks to be done simultaneously. Central processing units, or CPUs,
like the kind that Intel specializes in, are on the other hand much
less efficient but better at executing a single, serial task very
quickly. You can't chop up every computing process so that it can
be efficiently handled by a GPU, but for the ones you can --
including many AI applications -- you can perform it many times as
fast while expending the same power.
Intel was a primary driver of Moore's Law, but it was hardly the
only one. Perpetuating it required tens of thousands of engineers
and billions of dollars in investment across hundreds of companies
around the globe. Similarly, Nvidia isn't alone in driving Huang's
Law -- and in fact its own type of AI processing might, in some
applications, be losing its appeal. That's probably a major reason
it has moved to acquire chip architect Arm Holdings this month,
another company key to ongoing improvement in the speed of AI, for
$40 billion.
The pace of improvement in AI-specific hardware will make
possible a range of applications both utopian and dystopian, from
the end of automobile accidents to ubiquitous surveillance. But
it's also enabling, right now, a less fantastical application with
huge implications for how we shop and the fate of millions of
retail jobs: cashierless checkout.
San Francisco-based tech company Standard recently announced a
deal with Circle K to turn some of its stores into "grab and go"
experiences in the mold of Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Go stores. The
three-year-old startup installs cameras throughout stores, then
routes video from them to Nvidia-powered systems in the back, which
perform tens of trillions of calculations a second. As shoppers
grab objects off store shelves, the system tallies it all, and
bills them through their mobile devices as they walk out.
For perspective, a system performing this many operations a
second is faster than the most powerful supercomputer in the world
was as recently as 2012, at least at AI inference tasks.
"Honestly we could do nothing and just wait and Nvidia will drop
our prices every year," says Jordan Fisher, Standard's founder and
CEO.
Another category that Huang's Law affects is autonomous
vehicles. At San Diego-based TuSimple, a rapidly expanding
autonomous-trucking startup, the challenge is making a self-driving
system that can fit the power and space limitations of a
diesel-powered semi-trailer truck. On a typical TuSimple vehicle,
that means cramming the entire system, which can't draw more than 5
kilowatts, into an air-cooled cabinet in the sleeper cab.
Given such power constraints, what matters most is performance
per watt. TuSimple is seeing performance double every year on its
Nvidia-powered systems, says Xiaodi Hou, the company's co-founder
and chief technology officer.
Similar boosts in performance have been occurring since the
mid-2000s in a very different area of AI: our mobile phones.
In 2017, Apple introduced the iPhone 8, which included its
Neural Engine. Apple designed the chip specifically to run
machine-learning tasks, which are important to many kinds of AI.
(Its chip-manufacturing partner is Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Co.)
Apple's decision to make the chip accessible to any app on the
phone -- as well as the introduction of comparable chips and
software on Android phones -- allowed for new kinds of AI
businesses, says Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, co-founder and chief
technology officer of Nexar, a company that makes AI-powered
dashboard cameras for cars. By processing on users' phones streams
of video captured by dashboard cameras, Nexar's technology can
alert drivers to imminent hazards.
Uses of mobile AI are multiplying, in phones and smart devices
ranging from dishwashers to door locks to lightbulbs, as well as
the millions of sensors making their way to cities, factories and
industrial facilities. And chip designer Arm Holdings -- whose
patents Apple, among many tech companies large and small, licenses
for its iPhone chips -- is at the center of this revolution.
Over the last three to five years, machine-learning networks
have been increasing by orders of magnitude in efficiency, says
Dennis Laudick, vice president of marketing in Arm's
machine-learning group. "Now it's more about making things work in
a smaller and smaller environment," he adds. Arm's smallest and
most energy-sipping chips, tiny enough to be powered by a watch
battery, can now enable cameras to recognize objects in real
time.
This movement of AI processing from the cloud to the "edge" --
that is, on the devices themselves -- explains Nvidia's desire to
buy Arm, says Nexar co-founder and CEO Eran Shir. Nvidia has a near
monopoly on AI processing in the cloud. But where two years ago,
Nexar performed 40% of its data processing in the cloud, Arm-based
chips have enabled it to do much more of that processing in mobile
devices, and faster, since it doesn't have to be transmitted over
the internet first. Today, the cloud is doing only 15% of the work.
In addition, some functions, like a vision-based parking assistant,
were not even possible until recently, when the chips in phones
became much more capable.
Experts agree that the phenomenon I've labeled Huang's Law is
advancing at a blistering pace. However, its exact cadence can be
difficult to nail down. The nonprofit Open AI says that, based on a
classic AI image-recognition test, performance doubles roughly
every year and a half. But it's been a challenge even agreeing on
the definition of "performance." A consortium of researchers from
Google, Baidu, Harvard, Stanford and practically every other major
tech company are collaborating on an effort to better and more
objectively measure it.
Another caveat for Huang's Law is that it describes processing
power that can't be thrown at every application. Even in a
stereotypically AI-centric task like autonomous driving, most of
the code the system is running requires the CPU, says TuSimple's
Mr. Hou. Dr. Dally of Nvidia acknowledges this problem, and says
that when engineers radically speed up one part of a calculation,
whatever remains that can't be sped up naturally becomes the
bottleneck.
It's also possible that, like Moore's Law before it, Huang's Law
will run out of steam. That could happen within a decade, says
Steve Roddy, vice president of product marketing in Arm's
machine-learning group. But it could enable much in that relatively
short time, from driverless cars to factories and homes that sense
and respond to their environments.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 19, 2020 00:14 ET (04:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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