Chips Off the Old Block: Computers Are Taking Design Cues From Human Brains<br />In fall 2016, another team of Microsoft researchers — mirroring the work done by Jeff Dean at Google — built a neural network<br />that could, by one measure at least, recognize spoken words more accurately than the average human could.<br />These low-power chips — usually made by Nvidia — were originally designed to render images for games<br />and other software, and they worked hand-in-hand with the chip — usually made by Intel — at the center of a computer.<br />For about half a century, computer makers have built systems around a single, do-it-all chip — the central<br />processing unit — from a company like Intel, one of the world’s biggest semiconductor makers.<br />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<br />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.<br />But there was a catch: If the world’s more than one billion phones<br />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.<br />During his Christmas vacation in 2010, Mr. Burger, working with a few other chip researchers inside Microsoft, began exploring new hardware<br />that could accelerate the performance of Bing, the company’s internet search engine.<br />In 2011, Jeff Dean, one of the company’s most celebrated engineers, led a research team<br />that explored the idea of neural networks — essentially computer algorithms that can learn tasks on their own.
