Some of you will remember the days when downloading a movie meant a wait of over an hour. Today, the latest chips can send more than 160 full-HD movies over the internet in under one second.
The artificial intelligence chip industry has developed a newfound appreciation for high bandwidth memory, or HBM, the technology behind such lightning-fast data transfers. Analysts had once deemed it unlikely to ever become commercially viable when it was first launched in 2013.
But US chip designers Nvidia and AMD are breathing new life into the advanced technology that has now become a critical component in all AI chips. The most pressing issue for AI chipmakers is the ever-growing demand for more processing power and bandwidth requirements as companies rush to expand data centres and develop AI systems such as large language models.