In just 5 hours, the Chinese team launched the "world's first" AI fully automatic design CPU, with performance comparable to Intel 486!

Organize | Zheng Liyuan

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Under the AI craze set off by ChatGPT, more and more people are beginning to see the power of AI today: AI mapping, AI writing papers, AI coding, AI predicting the complete human proteome structure, AI discovery speed increased by 70% The new sorting algorithm for...

Now that AI seems to be "omnipotent", many people have asked: "Can AI really do design work like humans?" AI is indeed excellent in predicting protein structures and generating codes, but in design In general, the search space for AI is relatively small.

In order to explore the limits of AI design capabilities, institutions such as the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have recently focused on chip design, because "it is the brain of a computer and one of the most complex devices in the world designed by humans."

As a result, the final data was unexpected: the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions used AI technology to design the world's first CPU chip "Enlightenment No. 1" without human intervention and fully automatically generated - the entire training process took less than 5 hours, and the verification test was accurate Sex can reach >99.999999999%!

Let AI design an industrial-grade CPU without human intervention

According to the related paper "Pushing the Limits of Machine Design: Automated CPU Design with AI" (Pushing the Limits of Machine Design: Automated CPU Design with AI), the purpose of this research is: to give the machine the ability to independently design the CPU, in order to Exploring the boundaries of machine design.

"If a machine can design an industrial-grade CPU without human intervention, it will not only significantly improve design efficiency, but also push the limit of machine design to a level close to human performance, thus promoting the revolution of the semiconductor industry." The paper also stated. Added: "The ability to design machines for themselves, self-design, could serve as a fundamental step in building self-evolving machines."

With the basic direction, that is, to automate CPU design without manual programming, the team researchers decided to use AI technology to automatically generate CPU design directly from "input-output (IO)", without the need for human engineers to manually provide any code or natural language description.

Simply put, traditional CPU design requires a lot of manpower, including writing code, designing circuit logic, functional verification and optimization, and so on. However, by transforming the CPU automatic design problem into "circuit logic generation problem satisfying input-output specifications", only test cases are needed to directly generate circuit logic meeting requirements - which makes the extremely time-consuming traditional CPU design process Both "logic design" and "verification links" have been omitted.

CPU learning process, circuit logic representation and detailed learning process

To successfully start such an automated CPU design process, AI needs to be trained in advance, including observing a series of CPU inputs and outputs, so the paper emphasizes that the design of the CPU is "formed only from external input-output observations, not formally program code".

From these inputs and outputs, the researchers generated a BSD Binary Speculation Diagram (BSD) algorithm, and leveraged the principles of Monte Carlo-based extensions and Boolean functions to significantly improve the performance of AI-based CPU designs. accuracy and efficiency.

Comparable to Intel 486 series

Through the above step-by-step scrutiny, an automated AI design process for a CPU was formed: 4 million logic gates were generated in just 5 hours, and the world's first fully automatic CPU chip without manual intervention was born—Qimeng No. 1.

The chip layout of Qimen 1

According to the paper, Enlightenment No. 1 is based on RISC-V 32-bit architecture, adopts 65nm process, frequency can reach 300MHz, and can run Linux operating system. According to media reports, Qimeng-1 is 4,000 times larger than the circuit scale that can be designed by GPT-4 at the current stage.

Printed circuit board containing Enlightenment 1 chip for functional and performance evaluation

In addition, in the Drystone benchmark, the performance of Enlightenment 1 is not only comparable to the human-designed Intel 486 series CPU, but also slightly faster than the Acorn Archimedes A3010.

What's more worth mentioning is that the design cycle of this 32-bit RISC-V CPU completely designed by AI is nearly 1,000 times faster than that of a human team completing a similar CPU design, and the verification test accuracy can reach >99.999999999% .

However, some people may not care about this Enlightenment 1 designed by AI. After all, the Intel 486 series CPU (Intel 80486SX) with similar performance is already an "old chip" born in 1991 in the last century. But the researchers are still very proud of the development of Enlightenment 1: throughout the AI automation design process, they generated the BSD algorithm, and even independently discovered the von Neumann architecture (a program instruction memory and data memory combined in the computer-designed conceptual structure together).

**CPU generated entirely by AI is expected to outperform humans? **

In all fairness, as the world's first chip automatically generated by AI, the performance and scale of Enlightenment No. 1 cannot be compared with the current top mainstream CPU, but as stated at the beginning of the paper, this experiment itself is not for the development of high-performance chips, but is "exploring the boundaries of machine design".

Let AI build a new RISC-V CPU from scratch, the real meaning behind it is to study whether AI can be used to reduce the design and optimization cycle of the existing semiconductor industry in the future.

From this point of view, the experiment conducted by the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions has a preliminary conclusion: Compared with the CPU designed by traditional humans, the development cycle of Enlightenment No. 1 has been shortened by nearly 1000 times, because The time-consuming manual programming and verification process in the traditional CPU design flow is completely omitted.

"Our method changes the traditional CPU design process and has the potential to revolutionize the semiconductor industry." At the end of the paper, the researchers look forward to the future of fully designing chips by AI: "In addition to providing human-friendly design capabilities, this method also discovers that von Neumann architectures of human knowledge are more likely to yield aggressive (or even unknown) architectural optimizations in the future, which sheds some light on building a self-evolving machine that eventually beats the latest CPUs designed by humans .”

That is to say, the researchers believe that by continuously iterating AI chip design methods in the future, CPUs generated entirely by AI may be expected to reach or even surpass CPUs designed by humans. So what do you think about this statement?

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