With the rise of ai, energy and thermal efficiency have once again become pressing concerns for companies that use and build chips. The growing 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.
Vaire Computingbased in London and Seattle, is betting that reversible computing It will be the way to go. It has now raised $4 million in a seed funding round to work on building silicon chips that would consume negligible amounts of energy and generate little, if any, heat. The round was led by deep tech fund 7 percent of companies and Judas Crowdco-founder of Heyzap. The company had previously raised $500,000, so this round brings its total funding to $4.5 million.
In reversible computing, instead of executing a calculation in a single direction (inputs followed by outputs) and then feeding the output to a new calculation and executing it again, the calculation can be performed in both directions (known as computing ” reversible in time”). In effect, energy is retained within the chip rather than being released as heat. The theory is that this method would generate negligible amounts of heat, greatly reducing energy consumption. (A better explanation of its potential is found in this essay by Azeem Azhar and David Galbraith).
Vaire Computing was founded by serial entrepreneur Rodolfo Rosini and Hannah Earley, a researcher at the University of Cambridge working on “unconventional computing,” such as reversible and molecular computing.
During a call, Rosini told me: “About 100% of the energy in a chip ends up being dissipated as heat. So you're basically wasting it. But in a reversible chip, this energy is never actually dissipated. You do not allow the energy to be converted into heat and you recycle it internally. This means two things happen: one, the chip doesn't heat up and two, you only need a small amount of power to make it work. Therefore, it uses almost no energy, apart from the same amount of energy that it just recycled.”
The concept of reversible computing is not new, and there are many challenges along the way before Vaire's chips can become a reality, but Rosini believes that the shift towards this new approach to computing would not be much different from how we change the filament bulbs. to the LEDs. “The similarity is between an old incandescent filament-based light bulb and LED,” he said. “LEDs are cooler and more efficient, and there are a group of them… This is practically identical to reversible computing. “You don’t have a single core that is super fast, you have many smaller cores where each one is super efficient.”
According to him, a big advantage of chips that can perform reversible calculations would be their ability to be used in generic applications, just as regular CPUs are used today. “Other types of chips are domain-specific, but with computing you can do anything… We could also build a CPU or a GPU, and it would look like any other chip.”
When asked why funding in space is so low if the technology is as revolutionary as it seems, Rosini said: “Because the amount of money that was invested in reversible computing and alternative chip architecture is almost nothing,” he said, pointing out the billions spent on quantum computing, photonics and GPUs.
“If you go outside of these well-trodden areas and talk about building a completely new architecture, there's absolutely no one to fund it. Secondly, we don't need a lot of money to build the first chip and prove the technology… Once we prove it, we'll need a much larger round of funding to actually build a chip,” he added.
For his part, Earley believes that reversible computing could be used to make the most powerful computers. “I got involved in this area during my PhD in 2016,” she said. “By chance, my PhD supervisor sent me the thesis of my friend who was in the group at the University of Florida that was researching reversible computing. He interested me in how I could apply it to my field of research at the time, which was molecular programming. I began to think that reversible computing is interesting in itself, particularly because it could make the most powerful form of computer possible. After completing my PhD, I was introduced to Rudolfo and we realized we had the same vision.”
“Vaire Computing is different because its technology is innovative at a fundamental level, which positions the company extraordinarily well to capture a large share of the future market for ai chips and, ultimately, computer processors,” said Andrew J Scott, founding partner of 7percent Ventures. in a sentence.
Also participating in the round were Seedcamp, Clim8, Tom Knight (an inventor of modern reversible computing), and Jared Kopf, founder of ai/”>Ramble.ai.
Additionally, Vaire has hired Mike Frank, a leading researcher in reversible computing, as the company's chief scientist.
Vaire recently became one of ten companies named to the second UK cohort of Intel Ignite, Intel’s global startup accelerator program for early-stage deep tech startups.
