IBM's Roaring Come Back (In AI)

Posted: 12/8/2018

Remembered For Typewriters & Mainframes

In boxing, they say heavyweight champions once defeated never come back! IBM was for many years counted down for being a staid IT behemoth of former mainframe glory.

Their database technology is rather closed up and not well known outside of Fortune 500 companies or so. Even Oracle database technology is more accessible than that of IBM.

Was NIPS 2018 The Stage For A Comeback

IBM has for some time tried to come out with new innovative chip technologies or promote IBM Watson, but so far it appears these attempts were not exactly business success stories. Not sure, how much the IBM cloud offering is doing compared to its competitors, but it appears Microsoft oder Amazon are doing so much better.

However, at least since 2015 IBM was pushing for better hardware for AI (see e.g. Deep Learning with Limited Numerical Precision, Approximate Computing: Challenges And Opportunities). Certainly, AI needs urgently better and more powerful hardware!

At NIPS 2018, IBM came out showcasing their advances in hardware for AI, taunting Nvidia that GPUs had come to their limits (“post GPU era”):

1. IBM Scientists Demonstrate Mixed-Precision In-Memory Computing for the First Time; Hybrid Design for AI Hardware
2. 8-Bit Precision for Training Deep Learning Systems
3. Dual 8-Bit Breakthroughs Bring AI to the Edge
4. The future of hardware is AI
5. Training Deep Neural Networks with 8-bit Floating Point Numbers
6. Mixed-Precision In-Memory Computing

Are we entering a post von Neumann architecture era? IBM wants us to believe it.

We’ll see what the future holds for phase change memory; in memory computing; analog hardware; 8-bit precision; mixed precision computing etc. Stay tuned for more exciting things to come!

Let’s see how the competition will respond to this latest foray by IBM!