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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2306.12456 (cs)
[Submitted on 21 Jun 2023 (v1), last revised 27 Jun 2023 (this
version, v2)]

Title:Pushing the Limits of Machine Design: Automated CPU Design with
AI

Authors:Shuyao Cheng, Pengwei Jin, Qi Guo, Zidong Du, Rui Zhang,
Yunhao Tian, Xing Hu, Yongwei Zhao, Yifan Hao, Xiangtao Guan, Husheng
Han, Zhengyue Zhao, Ximing Liu, Ling Li, Xishan Zhang, Yuejie Chu,
Weilong Mao, Tianshi Chen, Yunji Chen
Download a PDF of the paper titled Pushing the Limits of Machine
Design: Automated CPU Design with AI, by Shuyao Cheng and 17 other
authors
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    Abstract: Design activity -- constructing an artifact description
    satisfying given goals and constraints -- distinguishes humanity
    from other animals and traditional machines, and endowing
    machines with design abilities at the human level or beyond has
    been a long-term pursuit. Though machines have already
    demonstrated their abilities in designing new materials,
    proteins, and computer programs with advanced artificial
    intelligence (AI) techniques, the search space for designing such
    objects is relatively small, and thus, "Can machines design like
    humans?" remains an open question. To explore the boundary of
    machine design, here we present a new AI approach to
    automatically design a central processing unit (CPU), the brain
    of a computer, and one of the world's most intricate devices
    humanity have ever designed. This approach generates the circuit
    logic, which is represented by a graph structure called Binary
    Speculation Diagram (BSD), of the CPU design from only external
    input-output observations instead of formal program code. During
    the generation of BSD, Monte Carlo-based expansion and the
    distance of Boolean functions are used to guarantee accuracy and
    efficiency, respectively. By efficiently exploring a search space
    of unprecedented size 10^{10^{540}}, which is the largest one of
    all machine-designed objects to our best knowledge, and thus
    pushing the limits of machine design, our approach generates an
    industrial-scale RISC-V CPU within only 5 hours. The taped-out
    CPU successfully runs the Linux operating system and performs
    comparably against the human-designed Intel 80486SX CPU. In
    addition to learning the world's first CPU only from input-output
    observations, which may reform the semiconductor industry by
    significantly reducing the design cycle, our approach even
    autonomously discovers human knowledge of the von Neumann
    architecture.

Comments: 28 pages
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Hardware Architecture
          (cs.AR)
Cite as:  arXiv:2306.12456 [cs.AI]
          (or arXiv:2306.12456v2 [cs.AI] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.12456
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Shuyao Cheng [view email]
[v1] Wed, 21 Jun 2023 05:50:33 UTC (3,756 KB)
[v2] Tue, 27 Jun 2023 07:53:50 UTC (3,756 KB)
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