Our processors are 100x more efficient than state-of-the-art low-power CPUs. A single AA battery can power our processors for up to a decade
That’s some really extraordinary claim.
An AA battery has around 10kJ of energy; spread over a decade that’s 31 microwatts of power. No way they’re doing useful computations with that.
A single AA battery is going to discharge itself just sitting on the shelf over a decade
It’s so ridiculous I’m not even going to bother with the article
In their defence, there are a few research papers on their site with respect to the startup. I’ve not read it yet, but it might probably be legit, given how most of the founding members are from ivy-league universities.
I mean, we know the absolute limits of computational efficiency thanks to the Landauer limit and the Margolus–Levitin theorem, and from those we know that we are so far from the limits that it is practically unfathomable.
If they can show some evidence that they can perform useful calculations 100x more efficiently than whatever they chose to compare against (definitely a cherry picked comparison) then I’ll give them my attention, but others have made similar claims in the past then turned out to be in extremely specific algorithms that use quantum calculations that are of course slower and less efficient on any traditional computer.
I’d like to see these chips benchmarked in the wild as well before getting too excited, but the claims aren’t that implausible. Incidentally, this approach is why M series chips are so much faster than x86 ones. Apple uses SoC architecture which eliminates the need for the bus, and they process independent instructions in parallel on multiple cores. And they’re just building that on existing ARM architecture. So, it’s not implausible that a chip and a compiler designed for this sort of parallelism from ground up could see a huge performance boost.
Thats not why Apple silicon is faster. Every modern mobile device uses a SoC these days.
It is very much part of the reason it’s faster than the traditional x86 architecture with a bus, which is what I was talking about. Here’s a good summary for you https://archive.is/DtT7c
So Intel, Apple, every other company that develops ARM based processors, AMD and Nvidia has just missed this technology ?
We’re talking about trillions of dollars in just R’n’D investments and this technology just flew under the radar?
If it sounds too good to be true, it is probably too good to be true.
Usually means “yes this works in theory but only for very specific operations at limited scales that aren’t all that important so it’s not worth pursuing seriously”
What about power and heat?
The article says that this architecture uses significantly less power which would mean producing less heat as well.