Seonglae ChoThermodynamic Sampling Unit
Instead of computing like traditional CPU/GPU, this new hardware directly samples from probability distributions. Short communication distances result in very low energy consumption. pbit: A basic unit that probabilistically oscillates between 0 and 1. Composed only of transistors, making commercialization feasible.
DTM
Denoising Thermodynamic Model is a generative model specifically designed for TSU, claiming to achieve approximately 10,000x energy efficiency compared to GPU. DTM maximizes the sampling part instead of matmul. While it may show performance improvements for diffusion or sampling-based variational inference, fundamentally for models with heavy matmul operations like transformer models, the acceleration effect is minimal or nonexistent.
Pbit probabilistic bit
The energy function E(x) of the distribution is encoded as physical interactions (coupling) in the circuit. * Each pbit's bias and connection strength W_{ij} reflects the structure of E(x). 2. The entire circuit, due to thermal noise + coupling dynamics * naturally performs Gibbs sampling dynamics over time. 3. Therefore, TSU physically instantiates the distribution P(x) ∝ e^{-E(x)}.
