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New chips for machine intelligence
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#12Will there be a customer grade TPU in the near future?
Or won't they be able to be as price/performance efficient compared to (nvidia) GPUs?
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#13Will there be a customer grade TPU in the near future? Or won't they be able to be as price/performance efficient compared to (nvidia) GPUs?
Will there be a customer grade TPU in the near future?
Would the nVidia Jetson count?
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#14I am surprised Amazon has not jumped in the game, renting out an accelerator like Google does with the TPUs
> I am surprised Amazon has not jumped in the game
Why should they? There is not a lot of money to be gained from renting niche product in comparison to enormous capital expenditure for anything hardware related.
Lot's of dotcom companies burned themselves badly while chasing trendsetters with custom silicon. A cookie cutter 40nm SoC may cost "just" 10M today, but by involving yourself into custom silicon game you risk loosing in it. Not to mention that your operations troubles will increase n-fold.
Managing operations of hosting business with hundreds of thousands customer is hard enough. Logistics, server lifecycle, DC management, managing procurement contracts with unruly OEMs... Now try to dock all troubles you have with chipmakers to it. It will become a nightmare.
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#15I am surprised Amazon has not jumped in the game, renting out an accelerator like Google does with the TPUs
AWS gpu compute is extremely expensive. If this is due to datacenter licensing costs, I hope they come out with their own hardware soon to reduce these costs. If on the otherhand, it's because their value-add is not in renting out the hardware but burst scalability, then I'm less optimistic that they'd cannibalize their own cloud product.
Currently, it only takes about 1 month to break even if you buy a consumer gpu like the rtx 2080ti, compared with AWS time. For training purposes it doesn't seem to make sense.
- just looked up the numbers and google tpus are pretty similar in terms of pricing. I think any aws equivalent would probably be just as expensive compared to a diy pc.
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#16Huawei looks like it has a strong game here:
"Ascend 910 is used for AI model training. In a typical training session based on ResNet-50, the combination of Ascend 910 and MindSpore is about two times faster at training AI models than other mainstream training cards using TensorFlow."
https://www.huawei.com/en/press-events/news/2019/8/Huawei-As...
edit: The software framework "MindSpore will go open source in the first quarter of 2020."
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#17Will there be a customer grade TPU in the near future? Or won't they be able to be as price/performance efficient compared to (nvidia) GPUs?
ARM socs already have NPU, but I guess they doesn't count.
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#18Small corrections:
> I’m focusing on chips designed for training
TPU 1 is designed for inference AFAIK.
> TPU v2: 45 TFLOPs
I think it would be great to clarify that what is commonly referred to as "TPU v2" (e.g. on GCP pricing, also what is shown in the image in this article), consists of 4 such modules with 8 cores total, which gives a more commonly quoted value of 180 TFLOPs.
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#19And this is ignoring all the bit players, some of which are doing crazy things like using analog multiplication.
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2755/analog-ai-startup-mythic...
That's currently just slideware at the moment.
Re: New chips for machine intelligence
#20[deleted]