Flow claims it can 100x any CPU’s power with its companion chip and some elbow grease

Comment
A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip, any CPU can instantly double its performance, increasing to as much as 100x with software tweaks.
If it works, it could help the industry keep up with the insatiable compute demand of AI makers.
Flow is a spinout of VTT, a Finland state-backed research organization that’s a bit like a national lab. The chip technology it’s commercializing, which it has branded the Parallel Processing Unit, is the result of research performed at that lab (though VTT is an investor, the IP is owned by Flow).
The claim, Flow is first to admit, is laughable on its face. You can’t just magically squeeze extra performance out of CPUs across architectures and code bases. If so, Intel or AMD or whoever would have done it years ago.
But Flow has been working on something that has been theoretically possible — it’s just that no one has been able to pull it off.
Central Processing Units have come a long way since the early days of vacuum tubes and punch cards, but in some fundamental ways they’re still the same. Their primary limitation is that as serial rather than parallel processors, they can only do one thing at a time. Of course, they switch that thing a billion times a second across multiple cores and pathways — but these are all ways of accommodating the single-lane nature of the CPU. (A GPU, in contrast, does many related calculations at once but is specialized in certain operations.)
“The CPU is the weakest link in computing,” said Flow co-founder and CEO Timo Valtonen. “It’s not up to its task, and this will need to change.”
CPUs have gotten very fast, but even with nanosecond level responsiveness, there’s a tremendous amount of waste in how instructions are carried out simply because of the basic limitation that one task needs to finish before the next one starts. (I’m simplifying here, not being a chip engineer myself.)
What Flow claims to have done is remove this limitation, turning the CPU from a one-lane street into a multi-lane highway. The CPU is still limited to doing one task at a time, but Flow’s PPU, as they call it, essentially performs nanosecond-scale traffic management on-die to move tasks into and out of the processor faster than has previously been possible.
Think of the CPU as a chef working in a kitchen. The chef can only work so fast, but what if that person had a superhuman assistant swapping knives and tools in and out of the chef’s hands, clearing the prepared food and putting in new ingredients, removing all tasks that aren’t actual chef stuff? The chef still only has two hands, but now the chef can work ten times as fast.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but it gives you an idea of what’s happening here, at least according to Flow’s internal tests and demos with the industry (and they are talking with everyone). The PPU doesn’t increase the clock frequency or push the system in other ways that would lead to extra heat or power; in other words, the chef is not being asked to chop twice as fast. It just more efficiently uses the CPU cycles that are already taking place.
This type of thing isn’t brand new, says Valtonen. “This has been studied and discussed in high level academia. You can already do parallelization, but it breaks legacy code, and then it’s useless.”
So it could be done. It just couldn’t be done without rewriting all the code in the world from the ground up, which kind of makes it a non-starter. A similar problem was solved by another Nordic compute company, ZeroPoint, which achieved high levels of memory compression while keeping data transparency with the rest of the system.
Flow’s big achievement, in other words, isn’t high-speed traffic management, but rather doing it without having to modify any code on any CPU or architecture that it has tested. It sounds kind of unhinged to say that arbitrary code can be executed twice as fast on any chip with no modification beyond integrating the PPU with the die.
Therein lies the primary challenge to Flow’s success as a business: unlike a software product, Flow’s tech needs to be included at the chip design level, meaning it doesn’t work retroactively, and the first chip with a PPU would necessarily be quite a ways down the road. Flow has shown that the tech works in FPGA-based test setups, but chipmakers would have to commit quite a lot of resources to see the gains in question.
The scale of those gains, and the fact that CPU improvements have been iterative and fractional over the last few years, may well have those chipmakers knocking on Flow’s door rather urgently, though. If you can really double your performance in one generation with one layout change, that’s a no-brainer.
Further performance gains come from refactoring and recompiling software to work better with the PPU-CPU combo. Flow says it has seen increases up to 100x with code that’s been modified (though not necessarily fully rewritten) to take advantage of its technology. The company is working on offering recompilation tools to make this task simpler for software makers who want to optimize for Flow-enabled chips.
Analyst Kevin Krewell from Tirias Research, who was briefed on Flow’s tech and referred to as an outside perspective on these matters, was more worried about industry uptake than the fundamentals.
He pointed out, quite rightly, that AI acceleration is the biggest market right now, something that can be targeted for with special silicon like Nvidia’s popular H100. Though a PPU-accelerated CPU would lead to gains across the board, chipmakers might not want to rock the boat too hard. And there’s simply the question of whether those companies are willing to invest significant resources into a largely unproven technology when they likely have a five-year plan that would be upset by that choice.
Will Flow’s tech become a must-have component for every chipmaker out there, catapulting it to fortune and prominence? Or will penny-pinching chipmakers decide to stay the course and keep extracting rent from the steadily growing compute market? Probably somewhere in between — but it is telling that, even if Flow has achieved a major engineering feat here, like all startups, the future of the company depends on its customers.
Flow is just now emerging from stealth, with €4 million (about $4.3 million) in pre-seed funding led by Butterfly Ventures, with participation from FOV Ventures, Sarsia, Stephen Industries, Superhero Capital and Business Finland.
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Tuesday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
Since April, a hacker with a history of selling stolen data has claimed a data breach of billions of records — impacting at least 300 million people — from a…
Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves.
Today marked the kickoff of Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC), the annual event where Apple announces some of the biggest features headed to its devices, apps and software. And this…
A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip, any CPU can instantly double its…
Five years ago, Day One Ventures had $11 million under management, and Bucher and her team have grown that to just over $450 million.
Particle announced it has partnered with news organization Reuters to collaborate on new business models and experiments in monetization.
The TechCrunch team runs down all of the biggest news from the Apple WWDC 2024 keynote in an easy-to-skim digest.
Mistral AI has closed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (around $640 million) in a mix of equity and debt.
Cognigy is helping create AI that can handle the highly repetitive, rote processes center workers face daily.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…
Featured Article
Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. What a week! In the same seven-day period, we watched Boeing’s Starliner launch astronauts to space for the first time, and then we…
Elon Musk’s posts seem to misunderstand the relationship Apple announced with OpenAI at WWDC 2024.
“We’re looking forward to doing integrations with other models, including Google Gemini, for instance, in the future,” Federighi said during WWDC 2024.
When Urvashi Barooah applied to MBA programs in 2015, she focused her applications around her dream of becoming a venture capitalist. She got rejected from every school, and was told…
Slack CEO Denise Dresser is speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
Apple kicked off its weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2024) event today with the customary keynote at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. The presentation focused on the company’s software offerings…
Apple’s SDKs (software development kits) have been updated with a variety of new APIs and frameworks.
Older iPhones or iPhone 15 users won’t be able to use these features.
Soon, Siri will be able to tap ChatGPT for “expertise” where it might be helpful, Apple says.
Apple Intelligence will have an understanding of who you’re talking with in a messaging conversation.
To use InSight, Apple TV+ subscribers can swipe down on their remote to bring up a display with actor names and character information in real time.
Siri is now more natural, more relevant and more personal — and it has new look.
The company has been pushing the feature as integral to all of its various operating system offerings, including iOS, macOS and the latest, VisionOS.
In addition to all the features you can find in the Passwords menu today, there’s a new column on the left that lets you more easily navigate your password collection.
With Smart Script, Apple says it’s making handwriting your notes even smoother and straighter.
iOS’ perennial tips calculating app is finally coming to the larger screen.
The new OS, announced at WWDC 2024, will allow users to mirror their iPhone screen directly on their Mac and even control it.
At Apple’s WWDC 2024, the company announced MacOS Sequoia.
“Messages via Satellite,” announced at Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote, works much like the SOS feature does.
Powered by WordPress VIP

source
Sponsor:News technical sponsor
Sponsor:News AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor