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Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

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Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#11

Why not use a gpu. A lot of AI stuff is linear algebra: Multiply accumulate etc.

despite gpus being fairly "general purpose" these days, there is still a lot of circuitry built for graphics pipeline like workloads. If you just want to do linear algebra you just need a high bandwidth interface to memory and lots of math units.

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the instruction set look like on that? Is there another example out of this type of chip?

Google has their Tensor Flow. chips, I would imagine it is similar.

Is there released documentation on the instruction set of the Google Cloud TPU?

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 100% positive that they considered that before starting to work on this ASIC. Some possible reasons: GPUs are insufficiently specialized, or use too much energy on the subset of work that Apple wants to enable with this chip. GPUs are too large. GPUs are busy doing other things, etc.

They considered it sure - but why did they conclude they should go with an ASIC? That's what grandparent asked and it was a reasonable question. "They considered that" isn't a suitable answer.

I think when you add "why try to reinvent the wheel?" to the end, it is less of a question and more of a statement. Similar to saying, "Why would you do that?" after someone does something silly. You aren't actually asking them why they'd do the thing. You're saying they ought not have.

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#14
This is probably going to be a hyper parallel fixed point / integer engine like TPU gen1. Doing fast matrix multiply over really small fields is very subpar on CPUs and GPUs. That was the initial reasoning behind TPU gen1 - improving runtime performance.

One question is if it will architecturally be closer to a GPU or an FPGA. The field moves so fast that it might make sense to "future-proof" a bit with a live-reconfigurable FPGA.

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 100% positive that they considered that before starting to work on this ASIC. Some possible reasons: GPUs are insufficiently specialized, or use too much energy on the subset of work that Apple wants to enable with this chip. GPUs are too large. GPUs are busy doing other things, etc.

They considered it sure - but why did they conclude they should go with an ASIC? That's what grandparent asked and it was a reasonable question. "They considered that" isn't a suitable answer.

The rest of the reply seems to be an answer (as far as you can get with Apple)

I don't think it's wild speculation to say Apple is looking for efficiencies they may not have been able to get with GPUs especially performance-per-watt since so many of their devices are mobile focused

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They considered it sure - but why did they conclude they should go with an ASIC? That's what grandparent asked and it was a reasonable question. "They considered that" isn't a suitable answer.

I think when you add "why try to reinvent the wheel?" to the end, it is less of a question and more of a statement. Similar to saying, "Why would you do that?" after someone does something silly. You aren't actually asking them why they'd do the thing. You're saying they ought not have.

But they didn't say that?

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when you add "why try to reinvent the wheel?" to the end, it is less of a question and more of a statement. Similar to saying, "Why would you do that?" after someone does something silly. You aren't actually asking them why they'd do the thing. You're saying they ought not have.

But they didn't say that?

They did, but they've since edited the comment.

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#18
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 100% positive that they considered that before starting to work on this ASIC. Some possible reasons: GPUs are insufficiently specialized, or use too much energy on the subset of work that Apple wants to enable with this chip. GPUs are too large. GPUs are busy doing other things, etc.

They considered it sure - but why did they conclude they should go with an ASIC? That's what grandparent asked and it was a reasonable question. "They considered that" isn't a suitable answer.

Basically just look up Google's TPUs and the reasoning behind them.

Re: Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

#19
I have been worried about this trend: if they don't open it up, things like this introduce a disparity between startups that can only have access to GPUs and big companies that make their own proprietary ASICs for their proprietary software, such that startups cannot complete.
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