As the benefits from Moore’s Law diminish, future computing performance improvements must rely on specialized accelerators for applications in artificial intelligence and data processing. In the future, these applications will be characterized by terabyte sized models, data sparsity and irregular control flow that will challenge the capabilities of conventional CPUs and GPUs.

In this talk, I explain how Reconfigurable Dataflow Accelerators (RDAs) can be used to boost the performance of a broad set of data-intensive applications with these characteristics. SambaNova Systems is using RDA technology contained in Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs) to achieve record-setting performance on challenging machine learning tasks.