With the rise of AI, energy and heat efficiency have once again become a concern for companies that use and manufacture chips. The skyrocketing demand for hardware to run AI models is driving up energy bills, as these servers require a large number of chips and huge cooling setups.
wire computingBased in London and Seattle, it is betting that Reversible computing This will be the way forward. It has now raised $4 million in a seed round to work on creating silicon chips that will consume negligible amounts of energy and generate little heat, if any. The round was led by Deep-Tech Fund 7Percent Ventures And Jude GomilaCo-founder of Heyzap. The company previously raised $500,000, so this round brings its total funding to $4.5 million.
In reversible computing, rather than running a calculation in only one direction (input followed by output) and then feeding the output into a new calculation and running it again, computing can be done in both directions (known as ‘time-reversible’ computing). Effectively, energy is retained inside the chip rather than being released as heat. The theory is that this method will generate negligible amounts of heat, greatly reducing energy consumption. (A better explanation of its potential follows this essay (By Azim Azhar and David Galbraith)
Ware Computing was founded by serial entrepreneur Rodolfo Rossini and Hannah Early, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who works on “unconventional computing” such as reversible and molecular computing.
On the call, Rossini told me: “Almost 100% of the energy in the chip is dissipated as heat. So you’re basically wasting it. But in a reversible chip, you never actually dissipate this energy. You don’t allow the energy to turn into heat, and you recycle it internally. This means that two things happen: one, the chip doesn’t heat up, and two, you only need a small amount of energy to make it work. So, it uses almost no energy, except for the same amount of energy that it just recycled.”
The concept of reversible computing isn’t new, and there are many challenges before Varay’s chips become a reality, but Rossini thinks the shift to this new approach to computing won’t be too different from how we switched from filament bulbs to LEDs. “The similarity is between old light bulbs based on incandescent filaments and LEDs,” he said. “LEDs are cooler and more efficient, and having a bunch of them… it’s virtually identical to reversible computing. You don’t have a single core that’s super fast, you have lots of little cores where each one is super efficient.”
He says a big advantage of chips that perform reversible computing will be that they can be used on generic applications, just as generic CPUs are used today. “Other types of chips are domain-specific, but with computing, you can do anything… We can even make a CPU or GPU, and it will look like any other chip.”
When asked why funding in this area is so low if this technology is as revolutionary as it seems, Rossini said: “Because the amount of money spent on reversible computing and alternative chip architectures is almost zero,” he said, pointing to the billions of dollars spent on quantum computing, photonics and GPUs.
He added, “If you talk about going outside of these well-established areas and building a brand new architecture, there is nobody who will fund it. Secondly, we don’t really need a lot of money to build the first chip and prove the technology… once we prove it, we will need a much bigger round to actually build a chip.”
For her part, Early believes that reversible computing could be used to create the most powerful computer possible. “I got involved in this field during my PhD in 2016,” she said. “By chance, my PhD supervisor sent me the thesis of my friend who was in a University of Florida group that was working on reversible computing. This made me interested in how I could apply it to my research area at the time, which was molecular programming. I started to think that reversible computing was interesting in itself, especially because it could create the most powerful form of computer possible. After completing my PhD, I was introduced to Rudolfo and we realized we had the same vision.”
“Wire Computing is distinct because its technology is innovative at a foundational level, which puts the company exceptionally well-positioned to capture a large share of the future AI chip and ultimately computer processor market,” Andrew J. Scott, founding partner of 7percent Ventures, said in a statement.
This round also saw participation from Seedcamp, Klim8, Tom Knight (inventor of modern reversible computing), and Jared Kopf, founders. Ramble.ai,
Additionally, Ware has appointed Mike Frank, a renowned researcher in reversible computing, as the company’s senior scientist.
Wyre recently became one of ten companies named in the second UK cohort of Intel Ignite, Intel’s global startup accelerator programme for early-stage deep tech startups.
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