China may win in the field of artificial intelligence - the battlefield of the future

so afraid Zvi Or-Bach CEO of MonolithIC 3D following an article by Alibaba engineers that shows that they were able to speed up AI applications a thousand times using chips with old technologies * In the interview we conducted with him, he explains that the miracle was done by laying the memory chip on the processor, that is, a XNUMXD chip that uses a different XNUMXD architecture

China may win in artificial intelligence computing which is the battlefield of the future. Says Zvi Or-Bach, MonolithIC 3D: in an interview with CHIPORTAL following an article he wrote in the professional press in which he warns that if the West does not come to its senses, China will use its advantage in AI as a weapon to subdue the West.

He cites a paper published as part of the 2022 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in which the researchers working at Alibaba (ALIBABA# NASDAQ: BABA) write that they used a 55 nm chip but managed to achieve a great improvement in artificial intelligence performance over Intel's 14 nm processor only By laying the memory above the processor and a hybrid connection between them. "If indeed the things written in the article are true, then they will reach supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence, and this is the medium in which the next war will actually be fought."

Or-Bach quotes Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson who said: "The technological engine of the next ten years is artificial intelligence. Are we ready for the greatest opportunity of our lives?" Dickerson travels the world talking to chipmakers and policymakers about the $10 trillion question: How do we capture the economic opportunity of artificial intelligence, which will transform almost every industry and institution in the coming years? In fact, artificial intelligence is a moving target because computing requirements double every three and a half months."

In a conversation with the science website and the Chiportal website, Or-Bach explains: "In the future war, whoever has a stronger AI will win. If the differences are as huge as the article shows, we could all have a big problem. I don't know how much the Chinese have progressed beyond the article and moved in a more applied direction, but I can say that the article shows a thousand-fold advantage in AI performance. And all this was done with a 55 nm chip versus a 14 nm chip. If this work is only the tip of the iceberg (because the Chinese rarely advertise), if we don't move quickly we will all be slaves to the Chinese."

The Chinese approached the problem in a completely different way and with a different 2017D architecture. In XNUMX I was at the ChipEx conference and noticed the possibility of increasing chip performance a thousand times in AI applications by using XNUMXD architecture. The achievement of the Chinese is no accident, it is real as we predicted ourselves already five years ago and if the West does not come to its senses we may find ourselves at a disadvantage in the field of artificial intelligence which will be difficult to catch up with."

The death of Moore's Law

"Until now, there has not been a strong enough reason to replace the traditional method of chip production, because according to Moore's Law, each generation provides a 30% improvement in performance. But in recent years there has been talk of Moore's Law slowing down if not stopping altogether. The Chinese also have another problem, because the West prevents them from using even the most advanced chips that already exist, so they went to 30D and got a performance improvement not of XNUMX% but of a thousand times in AI performance, and I can say that this is only the beginning." Or-Bach says.

"There are other ways to improve the performance of the chips that are not just the reduction of the node as has been the case so far in connection with Moore's law. Just to clarify, all electronic circuits in the world consist of a combination of conductors - metal wires and transistors. In the field of transistors we have improved a million times according to Moore's law. The metal wires did not improve. On the contrary, the smaller they are, the less good they are. Smart planning can compensate a little for the quality of the threads, but over time you cannot compensate for the threads. This is even more true when talking about memory."

"Today we work with two chips, a processor and a memory, which connect through a board and the information comes from one chip to the other through the I/O components of each of them. This situation severely limits future connectivity and actually the rate of improvement in computing performance. As soon as Alibaba took a processor chip from one factory and put a memory chip from a second factory and placed it on top of the first one, they are talking about a density of 100 thousand wires per square millimeter. This is orders of magnitude greater connectivity between the logic and the memory than can be done in the way we have been working until now, i.e. in the integration of two separate chips."

According to Or-Bach, he is keen on this insight among the computing industry in the world and in Israel in particular. I still believe that Israel can lead in the field of artificial intelligence because it is a matter of architecture and not of production TSMC will produce what we ask of it. Israel has all the knowledge required to lead, but I was not able to create momentum. I met with the chief scientist (now the Innovation Authority) and others but it didn't help.

Can you give an example of using AI as a weapon?

"The future war will not be like the wars in the past, the war at the moment is completely primitive. An example of this is a group of drones that will operate autonomously and do everything we ask of them without activating tanks. An example of this is the long column of Russian tanks moving slowly. This happens because the Ukrainians have superiority in the field of drones. They have purchased a Turkish drone and are destroying every Russian armored car or tank they see. Today these are individual drones that are operated remotely, but if it is possible to pick up many drones and control them using AI, it will be possible to locally harm anyone who wants to. It's all a matter of control and computing powers that if you're strong in them you can't be stopped. As I mentioned in the next wars the winners will be those who have an advantage in the field of artificial intelligence, especially if the difference is significant, and if we don't do it someone else will, and that's not always a good thing." Summarizes Or-Bach.

In recent years, tensions between the US and China have been increasing, and as a result, the US is denying China access to advanced chip manufacturing technologies and equipment. (a process that was also repeated with the Russians, in recent weeks due to the invasion of Ukraine) This includes access to advanced tools such as EUV lithography. Accordingly, it was reported that only TSMC, Samsung and Intel remained in the race in technology nodes that are less than 10nm in size. So it makes sense for Chinese companies to focus alternative resources on mature chip technologies, analysts say.

This could explain the adoption of hybrid linkage as a core technology by many Chinese companies. Hybrid coupling allows them to replace the dimensional magnification of the nodes with a three-dimensional magnification at the system level.

In August 2018, YMTC officially launched its breakthrough Xtacking architecture at the Flash Memory Summit and won the "Best in Show" award. In its 3D NAND product, it uses two chip production lines, one for the 3D NAND multilayer memory and one for the peripheral (memory control) circuits.

In September 2020, another Chinese company, IC League, published the results of its Heterogeneous Integration Technology on Chip (HITOC), an AI-oriented chip development, in a paper titled "Breaking the Memory Wall of Artificial Intelligence Chips with a New Dimension".

And as stated in the current article, it appears that the Chinese (in this case Alibaba engineers) were able to increase the performance of existing chips only by placing the memory above the processor in what is known as a three-dimensional chip.

From the article: “In HITOC, we have two wafers, a logical wafer and a memory wafer, pinned together (using a hybrid pin). In the logical slice, there are pools of processing units. Underneath this logical buffer in the second slice are buffers of DRAM arrays." The results reported by IC League were an overall improvement by orders of magnitude. At ISSCC 2022, Alibaba presented in a paper a more than a thousand-fold improvement in artificial intelligence computing devices using hybrid coupling.

"This paper presents a very important breakthrough in performance and power reduction. Alibaba researchers explain that "compared to the traditional CPU-DRAM system, our chip (Alibaba) achieves a speed of 9.78x (that is, almost 10 times, AB). They emphasize that throughput and memory capacity can be further improved by increasing the number of hybrid connection blocks or using more advanced process technologies to serve more complicated recommendation models.”

"In terms of energy efficiency, which is significant in memory-related applications, our work achieves 184.11QPS/W (QPS - Queries per Second), which exceeds the CPU-DRAM system by 317.43x. In terms of area efficiency, the high-density hybrid bonding improves QPS/mm2 by 660×.” The results were achieved using a relatively old process node of 55 nm for the logic and were compared to the leading Intel Xeon Gold processor at 14 nm."

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• A Chinese astronaut to the moon - when?
• The search for a new type of computer / John Poulos
• Gordon Moore - who was the CEO of Intel and invented Moore's Law and Prof. Michael Rabin among the winners of the 2010 Dan David Prize
• 50 years of Moore's Law: "The most significant development in modern times"
• A researcher managed to miniaturize hybrid chips without compromising their efficiency and accuracy