Chinese scientists have created a superfast analogue chip that can solve complex maths problems for advanced scientific tasks and artificial intelligence (AI) while using less power than conventional computing, according to a paper published this month.
The analogue device designed by researchers from Peking University uses memory chips made of resistive materials. With future improvements, it could perform calculations at a processing rate 1,000 times faster than top digital processors, such as the Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit (GPU), according to the team.
“Precision has long been the central bottleneck of analogue computing,” the researchers said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Electronics on October 13.
“How to achieve both high precision and scalability in analogue computing, thereby leveraging its inherent advantages for modern computing tasks, has been a ‘century-old problem’ plaguing the global scientific community,” study author Sun Zhong, an assistant professor at Peking University, was quoted as saying in a university news release.
“Benchmarking shows that our analogue computing approach could offer a 1,000 times higher throughput and 100 times better energy efficiency than state-of-the-art digital processors for the same precision,” the team said in the paper.
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Unlike digital computing, which relies on zeros and ones to store and process information, analogue computing processes information using values that can vary continuously within a range.
