With the rise of AI, energy efficiency and heat are once again a concern for companies that use and manufacture chips. The skyrocketing demand for hardware to run AI models drags down energy bills, as these servers require large numbers of chips and massive cooling setups.
Vaire Computing, based in London and Seattle, is betting that reversible computing will be the way forward. It has now raised $4 million in a Seed round to work on silicon chips that will consume inefficient energy and produce heat, if any. The round was led by deep tech fund 7percent Ventures and Jude Gomila, co-founder of Heyzap. The company previously raised $500,000, so this round brings its total funding to $4.5 million.
In reversible computing, instead of performing a calculation in only one direction (input followed by output) and then sending the output to a new calculation and running again, the computation can be done in both directions (known as ‘time-reversible’ computing. ). Effectively, energy is stored in the chip instead of being released as heat. The theory is that this method will produce heat that cannot be removed, and can reduce energy consumption. (A better explanation of this potential is in this essay by Azeem Azhar and David Galbraith).
Vaire Computing was founded by serial entrepreneur Rodolfo Rosini, and Hannah Earley, a researcher at Cambridge University working on “unconventional computing” such as reversible and molecular computing.
During the call, Rosini told me: “Nearly 100% of the energy in the chip is lost to heat. So you’re really wasting it. But in a reversible chip, you never lose that energy. You don’t let the energy heat up, and you It recycles internally. This means two things happen: One, the chip doesn’t heat up, and two, you only need a small amount of energy to run it. So, it uses almost no energy, except for the same energy that was just recycled.
The concept of reversible computing is not new, and there are many challenges before Vaire’s chips can become a reality, but Rosini thinks that the shift to this new approach to computing won’t be too different from how we switched from the filament light bulb. for LEDs. “The similarities between the old light bulbs based on incandescent filaments and LEDs,” he said. “LEDs are cooler and more efficient, and there are clusters… It’s almost like reversible computing. You don’t have one core that’s super fast, you have many smaller cores that are each super efficient.
He said that the big advantage of chips capable of performing reversible computations is their ability to be used in common applications, just like the normal CPUs used today. “Other types of chips are domain-specific, but with computing, you can do anything… We can also make a CPU or a GPU, and it will look like any other chip.”
When asked why there is so little funding in the space if the technology is revolutionary, Rosini said: “Because the amount of money that goes into reversible computing and alternative chip architecture is almost nothing,” he said. billion using quantum computing, Photonics and GPUs.
“If you go outside the vast area and talk about building a new architecture, absolutely no one will finance it. Secondly, we don’t need a lot of money to make the first chip and prove the technology… Once we prove that, we will need a bigger round to actually build the chip,” he added.
For his part, Earley believes that reversible computing can be used to create the most powerful computers. “I got involved in this area during my PhD in 2016,” he said. “Serendipitously, my PhD supervisor sent me a thesis from a friend of mine who was in a group at the University of Florida that was looking into reversible computing. I was interested to see how it could be applied to my research field at the time, which was molecular programming. I began to think that reversible computing was interesting in itself , mainly because it can make the most powerful computer.After completing my PhD, I was introduced to Rudolfo and we knew we had the same vision.
“Vaire Computing is different because of its innovative technology at a fundamental level, positioning the company well to take a big slice of the future AI chips, and ultimately, the computer processor market,” Andrew J Scott, founding partner at 7percent Ventures, said. in the statement.
The round also saw participation from Seedcamp, Clim8, Tom Knight (inventor of modern reversible computing), and Jared Kopf, founder of Ramble.ai.
In addition, Vaire has hired Mike Frank, a noted researcher in reversible computing, as the company’s senior scientist.
Vaire was recently one of only ten companies named in the second UK cohort of Intel Ignite, Intel’s global start-up accelerator program for early-stage deep technology start-ups.
