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Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

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Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom's Hardware has some nice tables comparing the specs: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cerebras-wafer-scale-engin... (more than the IEEE) This thing pulls 15-20kW of juice!

I did a double that when I realised that was Kilowatts not Watts. This chip uses more energy in an hour than the average household (in my country at least) does in a day. It may be a very large wafer but dissipating that heat is still very impressive.

It sounds like a lot but it almost isn't? Like this is ~50x bigger than an Nvidia A100, and the A100 pulls up to 400w. 50 * 400 ~= 20kW. So in terms of thermal density it's in-line with existing GPUs.

That said, I'd be fascinated to see the cooling solution. Is it just a massive copper heatsink & a boatload of airflow? Typical approaches of using heatpipes to expand the heatsink won't really work with something this big after all. Or is it a massive waterblock with multiple inlets/outlets so it can hit up a stack of radiators? How do they get even mounting pressure across that large of an area?

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#42

I think I once saw one of the founders with a wafer in an In n' out with a potential investor. Looking at what Apple achieved with their M1A and the demand for "AI" - or training neutral networks, what it really is - they have a lot of potential. At least as long as the AI bubble doesn't burst.

How can the future burst? It's like saying medicine will burst or physics

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#43

I think I once saw one of the founders with a wafer in an In n' out with a potential investor. Looking at what Apple achieved with their M1A and the demand for "AI" - or training neutral networks, what it really is - they have a lot of potential. At least as long as the AI bubble doesn't burst.

How can the future burst? It's like saying medicine will burst or physics

I don't know, expert systems haven't been so hot lately...

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can the future burst? It's like saying medicine will burst or physics

I don't know, expert systems haven't been so hot lately...

It's very surprising what people with downvote power do but it's *** to downvote anyone that disagrees. Anyway expert systems were a precursor to the technology and they got replaced much like new physics replace old physics.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#45
post #26

How much memory is on the chip, and what kind is it? Under what circumstances does the chip need to access external memory? What type of communication interfaces does this chip have? Also, if the chip is the size of a wafer, is it appropriate to call it a Chip?

40GB of SRAM. Not quite big enough to fit the big models like GPT3

I don’t think it’s straightforward to do a head to head comparison.

from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yso2S2Svdlg

@ 25:14

James Wang: "If a model doesn’t fit into a GPU’s HBM, is it smaller when it’s laid out in the Cerebras way relative to your 18 gigabytes?"

Andrew Feldman: "It is — it’s smaller in that we hold different things in memory than they do. One can imagine a model that has more parameters than we can hold — one can posit one, but remember our memory is doing different things. Our memory is basically holding parameters. That’s not what their memory is doing. Their memory is holding the shape of the model, their model is holding the results of the batches. We use memory rather differently. We haven’t found models that we can’t place and train on a chip. We expect them to emerge, that’s why we support clustering of chips and systems, that’s why we do that in whats called a “model parallel” way, where If you put two chips together you get twice the memory capacity. That’s not what you get when you put multiple GPUs together. When you put multiple GPUs together you get two versions of the same amount of memory, you actually don’t get twice the memory. I see you smiling here because you know that’s a problem… …With us if we support 4 billion parameters and you add a second wafer scale engine, now you support 8 billion parameters ,and if you add a third you can support 12 billion. That’s not the way it works with GPUs. With GPUs you just support two chips, each with a few million - tens of millions of parameters."

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#46

Time for an AI winter I guess.

You do realize that AI crossed human expert performance in NLP / Vision tasks ?

No, it hasn't. Not even close.

AI has "crossed human expert performance" on extremely narrow NLP/CV tasks.

AI is still light years away from human-level performance.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#47
Interesting--the placement of code-to-processor so that things will be done roughly at the same time sounds a lot like the VLIW compiler problem of scheduling execution units so things are available at exactly the right time, without hardware interlocks.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, expert systems haven't been so hot lately...

It's very surprising what people with downvote power do but it's *** to downvote anyone that disagrees. Anyway expert systems were a precursor to the technology and they got replaced much like new physics replace old physics.

Disagreeing doesn't mean you're right. AI is not equivalent to the future, and it will burst if it stalls and another AI winter cools the current hype cycle.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#50
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, expert systems haven't been so hot lately...

It's very surprising what people with downvote power do but it's *** to downvote anyone that disagrees. Anyway expert systems were a precursor to the technology and they got replaced much like new physics replace old physics.

It's because you made a false analogy. AI isn't literally "the future". Billions of $ are being invested in deep-learning focused AI right now (which you call "the future"), and yes it could be a bubble and it could burst. You can disagree, but it's still a sensible thing to predict.
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