19 year olds reshape CPU and reduce power consumption by 80%
Thomas Sohmers thinks, even if it is as strong as Intel, a company that shipments hundreds of millions of chips a year will have the same weakness. In his view, Intel's chips are too energy consuming. In his start-up company Rex Computing, Sohmers is studying another way to design chips, using only 20% of Intel's power consumption. The 19 year old started studying high performance computer clusters and went to high school.
2013, who received an investment of $100 thousand from investor Peter Thiel and encouraged him to start a company instead of completing his studies, he chose to quit school and set up Rex Computing. Sohmers joined Thiel Fellow and Paul Sebexen to set up Rex, and the company recently received $1 million 250 thousand from Founders Fund investment company.
Rex initially used its "Neo" chip to target very high-end data computing machines, which are similar to supercomputers. Sohmers said that once recognized, his company would be able to use the low-power chips developed by them in a wider market.
neo can also provide powerful computing power as a server chip, but it can make enterprises spend less on energy consumption, which is a great gospel for enterprises such as Google and Amazon, which depend on cloud computing, and its huge collection of servers needs to consume a lot of energy. If this technology is applied to consumer devices, Rex chips may help extend battery life.
Sohmers says he has talked to companies that use high-performance computers to handle images, run machine learning software, or handle wireless communication signals. The goal of Rex is to provide prototype chips to its partners next year, and will start selling the final version in mid 2017. The power consumption of
Rex chips is lower because they do not use standard circuit system modules from Intel and other company chips. Although the circuit system is more convenient for programmers, it wastes a lot, especially in memory management.
Rex chips use software to manage their memory, which allows them to throw away the circuit systems that are usually used in the chip and make the chip with the same computing power, but it has smaller size and less power.
Richard Vuduc, an associate professor of high performance computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, says that although Rex does not reduce the power consumption of each type of computing, the basic idea is reasonable.
however, the energy consumption of Rex in chip design is not so easily enjoyed by people. The existing software must be modified so that it can be compatible with Rex chips. Rex is working on a tool that allows software developers to do this more easily, but Sohmers acknowledges that they still have a lot of work to do.