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Based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Chinese researchers have released the world’s first fully automated processor chip design system, making AI-designed chips a reality. With a design comparable to human expert performance across multiple key metrics, this system is a critical step towards fully automated chip designs and could revolutionize how chips are designed and manufactured.
The system, named Qimeng, was jointly released by the Computing Technology Institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the CAS Software Institute, and was recently published on arxiv.org.
Qimeng acts like an automatic architect or builder for computer chips. Instead of engineers who manually design all components, AI is used to handle both the hardware and software aspects of chip creation.
It is expected to translate the hardware and software design paradigm of processor chips. This system not only significantly reduces human involvement, increases design efficiency and shortens development cycles, but also allows for quick and customized designs tailored to specific application scenarios.
Processor chips are hailed as “crown jewels” of modern science and technology, and their design process is extremely complex and accurate, requiring a very high level of expertise. Traditional processor chip designs rely heavily on a team of experienced professionals, often involving hundreds of people, taking months or years, and taking years to complete, resulting in high cost and long-term development cycles.
Meanwhile, the development of new technologies such as AI, cloud computing, and edge computing has led to rapid growth in market demand for specialized processor chips and the optimization of the corresponding underlying software. However, the number of experts engaged in the Chinese processor chip industry is very insufficient to meet this growing demand.
In response to these challenges, Qimeng systems utilize advanced AI technologies such as large-scale models to enable automated CPU designs. Reports also show that the corresponding underlying software for the chip can be automatically configured, such as the operating system, compiler, and high-performance kernel libraries.
Global Times
