20 - 019 Has the Human on a Smartphone got nearer?

The idea that a human could be fully defined digitally on a Smartphone, the thesis of the Digital Human Book, just got a little nearer. But only a little.

NVIDIA an American advanced chip designer previously focussed upon graphics processing chips and now entering the artificial intelligence marketplace has released their DGX A100 AI chip containing 54 billion transistors with a 5 petaflops performance. They are in the same marketplace as the other major chip designers and manufacturers Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and ARM.

It uses their Ampere architecture which is a single micro architecture for its Graphics Processing Unit’s (GPU) supporting both commercial AI and consumer graphics usage. Their specialist capabilities in support of graphics processing have now been applied to the broader capabilities required by artificial intelligence (AI) processing. At the end of the day it is all about the processing of on-off switches be they used for graphics or AI.

The DGX A100 is a 7 nanometer chip produced to this higher concentration of transistors but still on a 2D wafer. Significantly the current Apple A12 chip fitted to the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR and the 2019 iPad Air and 5^th Generation iPad Mini is also a 7 nanometer chip produced by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for Apple in Taiwan. But this only has 6.9 billion transistors. But it does show how near to the leading edge chip technologies your smartphone is getting in terms of its capabilities. When applied to a Smartphone these can be in your pocket now.

But to emulate a Digital Human on a Smartphone we are still probably a factor of several 1000’s if not millions off the processing power that will be needed. But it does show how amazing the biological human is in terms of sheer digital processing power. Unless how we humans actually do it takes us beyond digital (just on-off) into another dimension. Certainly we are also not limited to a 2D wafer like current chips with our storage running to three dimensions (3D) as per the brain. But our digital world is progressing although no doubt in 50 year’s time (2070) we will look back amazed at how crude our digital technologies were in 2020. We will be asking what’s a chip? What’s a Smartphone?