Abstract: AI and many other applications have opportunities to build systems that merge memory and computing into a unified structure in ways which yields significant improvements in energy efficiency, performance, and cost. In these scenarios, “moving the compute to the memory” makes sense because the applications have large amounts of data to process and relatively simple operations to perform, which makes it not too difficult to create specialized processing near the memory when traditionally moving the data to the main system processor would be slow and inefficient. These scenarios have a have a wide variety of applications as well as approaches. On one end of the spectrum, systems which have processing inside of an SSD to perform searches inside the drive itself, and on the other end of the spectrum, systems that have analog compute performing mathematics directly on the bitlines of the memory arrays. In this talk we will provide an overview of many of these approaches as well as the methods to their madness.
Biography: Laura Fick is the Head of Mixed-Signed Computing and a founding engineer of Mythic, an Austin, Texas based startup that is creating the next generation of inference microchips. Mythic uses mixed-signal computing to achieve 20-100x improvements in neural network energy efficiency and performance, and has raised M from top-tier investors to execute on this vision. Laura Fick earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Dave Fick is the CTO and co-founder of Mythic. Dave Fick earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.