artificial intelligence<\/a> chips, each of \u2060which has to be tested before sale \u200cby placing it on a specialized circuit board designed to determine whether it meets design goals such as speed and other functions.<\/p>\nWhereas the AI chips are cutting edge, \u200dhowever, many of the chips in the circuit boards for testing them are decades old. That makes testing the AI chips, which consume huge amounts of power and communicate at some of the fastest speeds in the industry,\u200b a challenge.<\/p>\n
To address the bottleneck, Nvidia has been working with Menlo Micro, a startup spun \u200cout from GE in 2016 and which has raised $227.5 million in funding from Corning and the venture fund of iPhone co-creator Tony Fadell. The result is a set of switching chips that improve the performance of test boards.<\/p>\n
Menlo Micro’s chips use switches made out of metal, similar to a light switch on a wall but fabricated at the scale of microchips using technology from a field called micro-electromechanical \u2060systems.<\/p>\n
In a research paper published on Wednesday, engineers from \u200bthe two firms said testing of Nvidia’s graphics processing units \u200b(GPU) could be sped up by 30% to 90% depending on the kind of test being performed.<\/p>\n
Russ Garcia, Menlo Micro’s chief executive, declined to \u200dsay how much business the \u2060startup is doing with Nvidia but said other major chipmakers are adopting its switching chips for testing boards as well.<\/p>\n
“The bottom line is, if you don’t validate the GPUs before you \u2060get into the data center, you’re going to have errors and other issues. This is the only way to \u200cvalidate these things at speed,” Garcia said in an interview.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Stephen \u200cNellis in San Francisco; Editing by Christopher Cushing)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) –Nvidia and Menlo Micro on Wednesday said they have used technology from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,156866,4321,156867,74,6072],"class_list":{"0":"post-301310","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-menlo-micro","12":"tag-nvidia","13":"tag-russ-garcia","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-testing"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}