The Deep Learning Revolution and Its Implications for Computer Architecture and Chip Design

Abstract

The past decade has seen a remarkable series of advances in machine learning, and in particular deep learning approaches based on artificial neural networks, to improve our abilities to build more accurate systems across a broad range of areas, including computer vision, speech recognition, language translation, and natural language understanding tasks. This paper is a companion paper to a keynote talk at the 2020 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) discussing some of the advances in machine learning, and their implications on the kinds of computational devices we need to build, especially in the post-Moore's Law-era. It also discusses some of the ways that machine learning may also be able to help with some aspects of the circuit design process. Finally, it provides a sketch of at least one interesting direction towards much larger-scale multi-task models that are sparsely activated and employ much more dynamic, example- and task-based routing than the machine learning models of today.