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An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

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Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#71

i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying? is it just a ploy to recruit robotics people? is it even plausible? i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects. its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting f…

i dont know why people downvote the shit out of me whatever i post. it seems like HN has become a cesspit of idiots... anyway i was very interested to see my comment validated by this guy

https://old.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/p7t14o/tesla_reve...

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#73
post #65

i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying? is it just a ploy to recruit robotics people? is it even plausible? i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects. its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting f…

Maybe they plan to get investors on "the hardware is great, it's only the software that has to be finished" just as with FSD.

to be honest FSD seems to be coming along albeit behind schedule. ive watched videos of the fsd beta and it is the closest thing ive ever seen to a car driving itself in an uncontrolled environment. i wonder what you make of dirty teslas latest driving video on youtube?

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#74

i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying? is it just a ploy to recruit robotics people? is it even plausible? i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects. its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting f…

>is it even plausible? The last commercial anthropomorphic was the Willow Garage PR2 back in 2010. It weighed 600 pounds, and had a wheeled base. Each arm had a max payload of 4 pounds. It cost $250,000. The company went bankrupt because there wasn't anything you could do with it. The tesla bot is supposed to be bipedal, only weigh 125 pounds, and have a "arm extend lift" of 10 lbs. Is that per arm, or both together?…

i think this comment illuminates the issue. seems like an industry veteran (unconfirmed) thinks having the thing walking around is plausible but is confused about interaction.

https://old.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/p7t14o/tesla_reve...

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#75
The fact that they didn't do this:

> Their current training cluster would be the 5th largest supercomputer if Tesla stopped all real workloads, ran Linpack, and submitted it to the Top500 list.

which is trivial to do, and pretty much a must when bringing up the cluster to make sure its working properly, so much that most clusters do this on every maintainance, along with another bunch of benchmarks;

and that they say this:

> cost equivalent versus Nvidia GPU, Tesla claims they can achieve 4x the performance, 1.3x higher performance per watt, and 5x smaller footprint.

but have no MLPerf results, tells you everything you need to know about it.

The list of long-term hype-only AI-hardware companies with billions of dollars of VC investment and literally nothing to show is incredible and keeps growing.

Every MLPerf round, the list of companies that want to submit is "huge", and 1 week before the deadline, 99.999% of them have been saying "we'll submit next round" for years.

It's as-if people would spend billions on creating an F1 team, and then notice during pre-season training that the car can't even finish a lap. And then fail to even start a lap on every race of the season. And then do this again, year after year, for a decade. Burning billions and billions...

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#76
post #31

> If their claims are true, Tesla has 1 upped everyone in the AI hardware and software field. I’m skeptical, but this is also a hardware geek’s wet dream. How is the author declaring Tesla has one upped everyone in AI hardware and software while the article has exactly zero references to TPUs?

Probably Google already have at 100x compute power of whatever Tesla has. (Sundar mentioned in Google I/O that a single TPU v4 pod has >1 exaflopfs)

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#77
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In their presentation yesterday they made it clear that they have a full software stack for programming it. I don't know what is marketing hype and what is real, but they suggested it is very easy for them to program for it.

Every hardware vendor ever says that. It's probably true for the people that built the software stack. Whether it is true for third parties is TBD.

There’s no third party here. As far as I can tell Tesla designed the chips and wrote the software stack to work together. They don’t want to rely on third parties for their critical infrastructure and AI chip design is vital to their success. At least this is what I can grok as an outsider.

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#78
post #75

The fact that they didn't do this: > Their current training cluster would be the 5th largest supercomputer if Tesla stopped all real workloads, ran Linpack, and submitted it to the Top500 list. which is trivial to do, and pretty much a must when bringing up the cluster to make sure its working properly, so much that most clusters do this on every maintainance, along with another bunch of benchmarks; and that they say…

What's often overlooked is just because you have a shit-ton of compute nodes doesn't mean you could make it to the TOP500. You might have the compute power, but the system most likely doesn't have the connectivity. E.g. on the first slide it says this is distributed over more than three locations, which essentially guarantees that the system doesn't have supercomputer-like connectivity as a whole. Worth pointing out that the networking in a supercomputer is a very significant chunk of cost and power.

And if it is tailored for AI, it might not even do 32-bit float, or only at a fraction of the "AI FLOPS".

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#79
post #37

Taking everything at face value: Dojo is overall a very impressive project! - Communication speed is one of the biggest bottlenecks to large models, so their bandwidth of 4TBps is very smart. - They claim a 1.3x perf/watt improvement, which is not really that great for ASICs compared to GPUs. Perf/watt is probably the most important number in datacenters. - They only use SRAM, no DRAM. This is a huge mistake, which l…

The thermal solution and packaging looks a lot like mainframe systems from the 80s (IBM, Siemens, Japanese).

Siemens H100: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ee56Q2bWkAA8vBE?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ee56Q2ZX0AEqAWo?format=jpg&name=...

IBM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ3oJlt4GrI

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#80
post #75

The fact that they didn't do this: > Their current training cluster would be the 5th largest supercomputer if Tesla stopped all real workloads, ran Linpack, and submitted it to the Top500 list. which is trivial to do, and pretty much a must when bringing up the cluster to make sure its working properly, so much that most clusters do this on every maintainance, along with another bunch of benchmarks; and that they say…

I don't get it - they're using it for actual work, rather than burning power to run useless benchmarks for bragging rights - and you think that makes it hype?! Surely it's the opposite - running benchmarks rather than doing something useful is hype.
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