I believe everyone has felt that we are in an era of artificial intelligence. If you want to ask what is the most important thing in the era of artificial intelligence? That must be: computing power! Computing power! Computing power! (Say important things three times)
As one of the three major factors promoting the development of artificial intelligence, computing power is called the “engine” and core driving force of artificial intelligence.
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Computing power is important, but what exactly is computing power? Document Master will take everyone to take a look~~
01. What is computing power?
“Computational power” literally means computational power. From ancient abacus to today's supercomputers, they are all carriers of computing power.
What we mean by computing power now isThe ability of computing systems (such as computers, servers, data centers, etc.) to process information and perform calculations. The higher the computing power of a computing system, the faster it can process data, and the more complex tasks it can complete.
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If the computing power of a computer is compared to the problem-solving speed of a student, then a computer with strong computing power is like a high school student who solves problems very quickly, while a computer with weak computing power is like a high school student who solves problems very quickly. Slow pupil.
The same arithmetic problem may take only one minute for high school students to solve, but it may take more time for elementary school students. Therefore, the amount of computing power directly affects the speed and efficiency of computer processing of data.
The units of computing power are as follows:
FLOPS
Floating Point Operations Per Second, floating point operations per second. Indicates how many floating-point operations a computing system can perform per second. It is the most commonly used unit to measure computing power.
IPS
Instructions Per Second, instructions/second. Indicates how many instructions the computing system can execute per second, and is more commonly used to measure the processing speed of the CPU.
TOPS
Trillion Operations Per Second, trillion operations per second. Indicates how many trillion (10^12) operations the processor can perform per second.
TOPS/W can also be used as a performance indicator to evaluate computing power, indicating how many trillion operations the processor can perform with 1W of power consumption.
02. The development history of computing power
After years of development, computing power has achieved a huge leap from abacus to cloud. Generally speaking, it can be divided into the following stages:
01. Mechanical Age: Abacus and Difference Engine
In distant ancient times, human calculation power was limited to ten fingers and some simple counting tools.
The emergence of the abacus brought people the first leap in computing power.
In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented the Pascal adding machine, the first real computer in human history, capable of performing addition and subtraction operations.
In the early 19th century, Charles Babbage conceived the Difference Engine, which could perform complex calculations and is considered the earliest general-purpose computer concept.
02.The Dawn of the Electronic Age: ENIAC and the Microprocessor
In 1946, the birth of the world's first electronic computer, ENIAC, ushered in the electronic era of computing power development.
In 1971, Intel launched the 4004 microprocessor, marking the arrival of the era of personal computing. The computing power of this chip seems not worth mentioning now, but it paved the way for the subsequent technological revolution.
03.The Big Bang in Personal Computing: The PC Revolution
In the 1980s, personal computers (PCs) began to become popular, computing power was no longer reserved for large institutions, and ordinary people could also enjoy the convenience brought by digital technology.
In the 1990s, the emergence and popularization of the Internet accelerated the growth of computing demand and promoted the further development of computing power.
04.Computing Power on the Cloud: Cloud Computing and AI
In the 21st century, mobile computing and cloud computing are booming. The emergence of cloud computing allows computing power to “flow” through the network to every corner where it is needed, just like water and electricity.
The rise of artificial intelligence has put forward higher requirements for computing power. The emergence of dedicated hardware such as GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) has greatly improved processing efficiency and provided Provides powerful support for training and inference of machine learning models.
03. The importance of computing power
At the beginning of this article, Doc mentioned that the most important thing in the new era of artificial intelligence is computing power. Computing power is crucial to artificial intelligence, and it affects almost every aspect of the field of artificial intelligence.
Implement complex models
Modern artificial intelligence, especially deep learning techniques, rely on complex neural network models that contain millions or even billions of parameters.
High computing power makes it possible to train these large models. Only sufficient computing power can enable the model to complete learning from massive data within a reasonable time frame.
Shorten training time
Powerful computing power can greatly shorten the training time of the model. With low computing power, training a complex deep learning model can take weeks or even months. With the improvement of computing power, the same training task can be completed in days, hours or even shorter time.
Support real-time analysis and decision-making
In many application scenarios, such as self-driving cars, financial transaction analysis, intelligent medical systems, etc., AI models need to process data and make decisions in real time. Powerful computing power can ensure that these systems can quickly process input data and respond in a timely manner.
Promote innovation in AI technology
As computing power increases, AI researchers are able to try more experiments and explore new algorithms and model architectures. This not only accelerates the improvement of existing technologies, but may also lead to breakthrough new technologies.
For example, significant progress in the field of natural language processing (NLP) in recent years has been largely due to the significant increase in available computing power.
In addition to the field of artificial intelligence, computing power has a major impact in climate simulation, astrophysics, financial analysis, medical health, transportation, information security, scientific research and other aspects.
It can be said that the improvement of computing power is the foundation and guarantee for realizing these applications, and it is also the cornerstone of the digital world.
04. Conclusion
That’s it for today’s little knowledge about computing power. Let me summarize the key points on the blackboard~~
I believe that computing power will continue to play an important role in the future development process. Whether in games, artificial intelligence or other fields, the development of computing power will bring us more innovations and possibilities.
To learn more about computing power, please continue to pay attentionZTE DocumentsThe launched series of pictures and texts on computing power will take you from the simple to the deep into the world of computing power.