An IPU accelerator card from Graphcore. (Photographer: Catherine Hyland for Bloomberg Businessweek)
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Simon Knowles, chief technology officer of Graphcore Ltd., is smiling at a whiteboard as he maps out his vision for the future of machine learning. He uses a black marker to dot and diagram the nodes of the human brain: the parts that are “ruminative, that think deeply, that ponder.” His startup is trying to approximate these neurons and synapses in its next-generation computer processors, which the compan...