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Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

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Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#3
post #2

Cerebras WSE-3 contains 4 trillion transistors and 8 exaflops per sec, 20 PB bandwidth. 62 times the cores of an H100.. 900,000. I wonder if the WSE-3 can compete on price / performance though. Interesting times!

How's the single core-to-core bandwidth?

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#4
When the limits of digital reaches the boundary of physics, Analogue is going make a comeback. Human brain feels nearer to Analogue than Digital. I will be surprised to reach AGI without nearing the Order-of-Magnitude of brain processing.

We need that ONE paper on analogue to end this quest of trillions and counting transistors.

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#5
post #2

Cerebras WSE-3 contains 4 trillion transistors and 8 exaflops per sec, 20 PB bandwidth. 62 times the cores of an H100.. 900,000. I wonder if the WSE-3 can compete on price / performance though. Interesting times!

Is anyone actually using those WSEs in anger yet? They're on their third generation now, but as far as I can tell the discussion of each generation consists of "Cerebras announces new giant chip" and then radio silence until they announce the next giant chip.

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#7
post #2

Cerebras WSE-3 contains 4 trillion transistors and 8 exaflops per sec, 20 PB bandwidth. 62 times the cores of an H100.. 900,000. I wonder if the WSE-3 can compete on price / performance though. Interesting times!

> 62 times the cores of an H100.. 900,000.

More than that arguably. CUDA cores are more like SIMD lanes than CPU cores like cerebras's usage of 'core'. Since they have 4 wide tensor ops on cerebras, there's arguably 3.6M CUDA equivalent cores.

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#8
Yeah I also think that the impact of better hardware generates a visible lead in quality in the models that are released, for example: companies like OpenAI have had access to large quantities of H100 for a few months now and Sora is being presented, something I would not have believed a year ago, I would also believe that Claude 3 models were trained on H100, DBRX was trained on 12T tokens, a big difference compared to the 300B for the original GPT-3, the new NovelAI image generation was trained on H100 and compared to the previous model is like day and night. It seems to create a generational jump.

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#9

When the limits of digital reaches the boundary of physics, Analogue is going make a comeback. Human brain feels nearer to Analogue than Digital. I will be surprised to reach AGI without nearing the Order-of-Magnitude of brain processing. We need that ONE paper on analogue to end this quest of trillions and counting transistors.

Won't that mean that we just change the quest from higher and higher density of digital elements to higher and higher density of analog elements?

Like people weren't trying to make computers out of bigger and bigger tubes before the transistor, they were trying to make them out of smaller and smaller ones.

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#10

When the limits of digital reaches the boundary of physics, Analogue is going make a comeback. Human brain feels nearer to Analogue than Digital. I will be surprised to reach AGI without nearing the Order-of-Magnitude of brain processing. We need that ONE paper on analogue to end this quest of trillions and counting transistors.

Computers are going to increase in size as they consume more and more power, requiring increasingly elaborate cooling systems.

Like how the transistor made the big and hot vacuum tubes obsolete, maybe we’ll see some analog breakthrough do the same thing to transistors, at least for AI.

I doubt there is a world where we use analog for general purpose computing, but it seems perfect for messy, probabilistic processes like thinking.

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