IBM has announced its “Artificial Intelligence Unit” (AIU), an expansion board compatible with any server or workstation, regardless of manufacturer, that supports PCIe expansion slots. The AIU interfaces an IBM-designed application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), built with 5 nanometre feature size transistors, with 32 accelerator cores and 23 billion transistors.
The cores perform computation with precision ranging from 32 bit floating point all the way down to 8 bit floating point and 2 bit integer. IBM has been a leader in “approximate computing”—using reduced precision to improve performance in AI training and inference computation.