Chips Off the Old Block: Computers Are Taking Design Cues From Human Brains
In fall 2016, another team of Microsoft researchers — mirroring the work done by Jeff Dean at Google — built a neural network
that could, by one measure at least, recognize spoken words more accurately than the average human could.
These low-power chips — usually made by Nvidia — were originally designed to render images for games
and other software, and they worked hand-in-hand with the chip — usually made by Intel — at the center of a computer.
For about half a century, computer makers have built systems around a single, do-it-all chip — the central
processing unit — from a company like Intel, one of the world’s biggest semiconductor makers.
This migration could also diminish the power of Intel, the longtime giant of chip design and manufacturing, and fundamentally remake the $335 billion a year semiconductor industry
that sits at the heart of all things tech, from the data centers that drive the internet to your iPhone to the virtual reality headsets and flying drones of tomorrow.
But there was a catch: If the world’s more than one billion phones
that operated on Google’s Android software used the new service just three minutes a day, Mr. Dean realized, Google would have to double its data center capacity in order to support it.
During his Christmas vacation in 2010, Mr. Burger, working with a few other chip researchers inside Microsoft, began exploring new hardware
that could accelerate the performance of Bing, the company’s internet search engine.
In 2011, Jeff Dean, one of the company’s most celebrated engineers, led a research team
that explored the idea of neural networks — essentially computer algorithms that can learn tasks on their own.