Normal Computing Tapes Out CN101, World’s First Thermodynamic AI Chip

Normal Computing announces the successful tape-out of CN101, the world's first thermodynamic computing chip. This engineering milestone represents a key step toward validating Normal's Carnot architecture, purpose-built to accelerate computational tasks by harnessing the intrinsic dynamics of physical systems and achieving up to 1000× energy consumption efficiency on targeted AI and scientific workloads. By enabling significantly more AI within fixed datacenter energy budgets, CN101 maximizes total compute output and pairs this with low-latency, high-throughput performance for production inference.

Normal chips are Physics-Based ASICs that harness natural dynamics such as fluctuations, dissipation, and stochasticity to compute far more efficiently than traditional chips. While CPUs and GPUs consume substantial energy enforcing deterministic logic, Normal's chips exploit stochasticity to accelerate AI reasoning. This approach was highlighted by IEEE Spectrum, underscoring its potential to dramatically enhance computational efficiency over traditional methods (read article).