SKT develops AI accelerator for data processing

SK Telecom's researchers test the firm's newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator, dubbed AIX, at the firm's office in Bundang, Gyeonggi Province. / Courtesy of SK Telecom

By Jun Ji-hye

The nation's top mobile carrier SK Telecom (SKT) has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator, a computer system designed to accelerate data-intensive artificial neural networks, the company said Thursday.

The system dubbed AI Inference Accelerator (AIX) raises the speed of data processing and performance of AI devices without increasing servers or installing additional equipment.

The telecom company said it has applied the AIX to its voice-controlled AI service called NUGU, noting this would increase the service capacity by about 500 percent.

The system will also help reduce data center operating costs as its power efficiency is 16 times better than that of products based on graphics processing units (GPUs), the company said.

“SK Telecom is the first among domestic companies to apply an AI accelerator to commercial services,” said Chung Moo-kyoung, leader of the ICT R&D center at SKT's Machine Learning Infra Lab, during a press conference held at the firm's head office in central Seoul.

Installed in the AI server of the data center, the palm-sized AI accelerator increases computing speed by 20 times as it focuses on novel dataflow architecture, Chung explained.

The firm said the development of the accelerator, which took about two years, comes as AI-related services have expanded to almost all areas of people's lives including finance, security and shopping. This requires companies to manage heavy data increases.

The company noted the number of users of its NUGU service has also increased rapidly, reaching 3 million a month in the first quarter of this year.

According to a report issued in March by U.S. market researcher Tractica, the scale of the global market of AI chipsets including AI accelerators is expected to be about $66 billion in 2025. This is why global companies including Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA are concentrating their efforts on developing and commercializing AI accelerators.

AI accelerators can be utilized in a variety of areas, including as AI assistant servers and security services such as surveillance cameras, SKT noted.

The Korean firm plans to develop the next-generation AI accelerator to further improve computing speed and power efficiency.