Schools brief | Artificial intelligence

The race is on to control the global supply chain for AI chips

The focus is no longer just on faster chips, but on more chips clustered together

A hand holding a computer chip under thunder.
image: Mike Haddad

In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments engineered a silicon chip with a single transistor. By 1965 Fairchild Semiconductor had learned how to make a piece of silicon with 50 of the things. As Gordon Moore, one of Fairchild’s founders, observed that year, the number of transistors that could fit on a piece of silicon was doubling on a more or less annual basis.

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This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “The matrix multiplications”

From the August 3rd 2024 edition

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