MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (07/25/2024) — Engineering researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have demonstrated a state-of-the-art hardware device that could reduce energy consumption for artificial intelligent (AI) computing applications by a factor of at least 1,000.
The research is published in npj Unconventional Computing, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Nature. The researchers have multiple patents on the technology used in the device.
With the growing demand of AI applications, researchers have been looking at ways to create a more energy efficient process, while keeping performance high and costs low. Commonly, machine or artificial intelligence processes transfer data between both logic (where information is processed within a system) and memory (where the data is stored), consuming a large amount of power and energy.
A team of researchers in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering demonstrated a new model where the data never leaves the memory, called computational random-access memory (CRAM).