The ideal processing chip would consume less power, would be cheap, whilst having better performance. Well, this ideal might just become a reality as AI processor company Mythic has just launched their new M1076 Analog Matrix Processor to provide a low-power AI processing solution.
It’s called an analog processor because the company uses analog circuits rather than digital to create its processor.
This design philosophy means that it’s easier to integrate memory into the processor itself and help push power consumption lower by a unit of 10. The company might be taking a jab at the competition because Nvidia’s Jetson AI costs more and consumes more power while the M1076 is 10 times faster.
The M1076 AMP can support up to 25 trillion operations per second or TOPS of AI compute in a 3-watt power envelope. It is targeted at AI at the edge applications but it can scale from the edge to server applications, addressing multiple vertical markets including smart cities, industrial applications, enterprise applications, and consumer devices.
The CEO Mike Henry said last may in an interview that “We had a high level of ambition on the technical side,” Henry said. “This was a milestone almost everyone thought was impossible. It’s been pursued since the 1960s. We have developed a disruptive way of doing a computer AI that gives us the same compute as a GPU but at a much lower cost and power”.
The M1076 AMP comes in several form factors including a standalone processor, a PCIe M.2 card, and a 16 Chip PCI-e configuration that can deliver up to 400 TOPS of AI compute while only consuming 75 watts of power. The company has been scaling up its processes to cater their growing customer base in Europe, Asia, and the US.