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IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

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31–40 of 71 posts

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#31

Rule of thumb: IBM tends to spoof results to get published, then use the published results to trick tech-illiterate clients into using their stack. At conferences I used to go to, they'd just phack the hyperparameters of an ensemble model on the benchmark sets, and put out a press release saying they were state of the art. They were mostly ignored by the academics who went to the talks on the actual novel work.

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Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm all I've seen about Foveon is just stacked RGB sensing. Ie there is no computation involving multiple pixels or anything like that.

Outside of the books I mention the Foveon information online is bad and deteriorating. I mean they don’t seem to mention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Mahowald From what I recall there are analog feedback stages between adjacent cells, and that was a ongoing theme throughout the work of the teams around Mead. His neuromorphic book is almost entirely about doing that to sound and images. As an aside the Foveon…

Do you have an example or can expand on what you mean about the last point? Isn't sharpness mostly limited by the lens systems in modern cameras rather than the Bayer sensor resolution?

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#33
post #31

Rule of thumb: IBM tends to spoof results to get published, then use the published results to trick tech-illiterate clients into using their stack. At conferences I used to go to, they'd just phack the hyperparameters of an ensemble model on the benchmark sets, and put out a press release saying they were state of the art. They were mostly ignored by the academics who went to the talks on the actual novel work.

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[deleted]

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#34
I have become pretty wary of all headlines touting how a new chip is going to dethrone Nvidia. The problem with every hardware company is that they ridiculously underestimate software. I think the only way a company is going to start competing is by being software first. Make the software so good and easy to use that every one wants to use it. Only then is the hardware going to compete.

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#35
> The 14nm analog chip mimics the human brain

I do with that at least _tech journalism_ outlets would develop a habit of asking at least one followup question when a PR says that something is like the human brain. Having analog values between zero and one is not at all particular to the human brain, or any brain, where we have spikes occurring at varying rates, not scalar activation levels. This chip could equally well be described as having components which mimic a dimmer switch, or perhaps a gas gauge that varies between empty and full. Yes, that's cool. No, it's not really brain-like.

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably that is what the Foveon sensor did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor There is a book called The Silicon Eye about the history, and not coincidentally Carver Mead also wrote a book on neuromorphic analog neural network implementation back in the 80s.

Hmm all I've seen about Foveon is just stacked RGB sensing. Ie there is no computation involving multiple pixels or anything like that.

Foveon is apparently "more of YUV", because it's not yet possible to band-stop just the desired wavelength range for each layers and let others pass. Instead the three layers gets RGB, RG and R channels respectively, and the camera computes the delta.

The "Quattro" generation Foveon used 2x2 subpixels for the top layer. My impression then was it was a last-ditch effort to mitigate poor sensitivity, but it's interesting how it was arguably an only analog convolutional network processor in a consumer product, from a different perspective.

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the books I mention the Foveon information online is bad and deteriorating. I mean they don’t seem to mention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Mahowald From what I recall there are analog feedback stages between adjacent cells, and that was a ongoing theme throughout the work of the teams around Mead. His neuromorphic book is almost entirely about doing that to sound and images. As an aside the Foveon…

Do you have an example or can expand on what you mean about the last point? Isn't sharpness mostly limited by the lens systems in modern cameras rather than the Bayer sensor resolution?

The use of a bayer filter means that the actual edges for different colour areas are created in software processing afterwards. This causes everything to be slightly misaligned and fuzzy in a way the foveon was not, and no amount of reconstructive processing is going to help you.

Of course today the actual resolution of more conventional sensors dramatically exceeds the best foveons to the point where this advantage is nullified.

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#38
post #35

> The 14nm analog chip mimics the human brain I do with that at least _tech journalism_ outlets would develop a habit of asking at least one followup question when a PR says that something is like the human brain. Having analog values between zero and one is not at all particular to the human brain, or any brain, where we have spikes occurring at varying rates, not scalar activation levels. This chip could equally we…

[deleted]

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#39
post #34

I have become pretty wary of all headlines touting how a new chip is going to dethrone Nvidia. The problem with every hardware company is that they ridiculously underestimate software. I think the only way a company is going to start competing is by being software first. Make the software so good and easy to use that every one wants to use it. Only then is the hardware going to compete.

IBM has a long history of competent software development, hardware development, and product development. This isn't a kickstarter. It's backed by published research as was the case for relational databases.

Re: IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money

#40
This does sound very intriguing. Even if it would only take away some inference load when it becomes viable. Has a non-zero chance of spawning the next leap in computing?

Considering IBM likely isn't going to crater in stock like some riskier bet might, and even if it's just to benefit from initial hype, I don't see a negative in moving chips I have laying around to big blue even though I very rarely do trades nowadays.

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