SemiEng: Amdahl Limits On AI

The application of old techniques to new problems only gets you so far. To remove limitations in AI processors, new thinking is required.

Software and hardware both place limits on how fast an application can run, but finding and eliminating the limitations is becoming more important in this age of multicore heterogeneous processing.
The problem is certainly not new. Gene Amdahl (1922-2015) recognized the issue and published a paper about it in 1967. It provided the theoretical speedup for a defined task that could be expected when additional hardware resources were added, and became known as Amdahl’s Law. What it comes down to is that the theoretical speedup is always limited by the part of the task that cannot benefit from the improvement…

To read the full Semiconductor Engineering article by Brian Bailey, click here.

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