The Looming Battle Over AI Chips

Post by pm90 » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #25

deepnotderp wrote: post #18

Do people think that nobody at nVidia has ever heard of specialized deep learning processors? 1. Volta GPUs already have little matmul cores, basically a bunch of little TPUs. 2. The graphics dedicated silicon is an extremely tiny portion of the die, a trivial component (source: Bill Dally, nVidia chief scientist). 3. Memory access power and performance is the bottleneck (even in the TPU paper), and will only continu…

And Intel knew that mobile chips will one day become very popular, too - two decades ago. Much good did that knowledge do to the company. It's not about them being ignorant about it. It's about them making decisions in spite of that knowledge - decisions that Make Sense™ for the advancement and increased profitability of the incumbent cash cow, but they are often contradictory or have a negative impact on new tech in…

Post by jacksmith21006 » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #22

Alphabet has already made its AI chip...its second generation already.

Post by bytematic » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #19

oneshot908 wrote: post #14

If you're FB, GOOG, AAPL, AMZN, BIDU, etc, this strategy makes sense because much like they have siloed data, they also have siloed computation graphs for which they can lovingly design artisan transistors to make the perfect craft ASIC. There's big money in this. Or you can be like BIDU, buy 100K consumer GPUs, and put them in your datacenter. In response, Jensen altered the CUDA 9.1 licensing agreement and the EULA…

FYI I think your comment is informative and I understood a lot of it but that's a shitton of acronymns for the uninitiated.

Post by oneshot908 » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

arca_vorago wrote: post #40

oneshot908 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably won't. For every oppressive move NVDA has made so far, there has been a swarm of low-information technophobe MBA sorts who eat their computational agitprop right up, some of them even fashion themselves as data scientists. More likely, NVDA continues becoming the Oracle of AI that everyone needs and everyone hates.

So is OpenCL dead? Because that's how everyone is talking. The tools you choose, and their licensing, matters!

Post by sofaofthedamned » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #12

Nvidia, moreover, increasingly views its software for programming its chips, called CUDA, as a kind of vast operating system that would span all of the machine learning in the world, an operating system akin to what Microsoft (MSFT) was in the old days of PCs. Yeah, nVidia throwing it's weight around in terms of requiring that data centers pay more to use cheap consumer gaming chips may turn out to backfire and certa…