Live data from Hacker News

New chips for machine intelligence

jameswhanlon.com

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#21
post #12

Will there be a customer grade TPU in the near future? Or won't they be able to be as price/performance efficient compared to (nvidia) GPUs?

Kendryte K210 maybe? It's cheap as chips (pun intended!) I think I got mine for £40 including shipping. https://kendryte.com/ Note this is only for inference. For training you'll have to use a GPGPU or one of the chips in this article.

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#22
Some of the numbers in that table do not make any sense and makes me question the quality of the entire article.

Where are the numbers for the Cerebras chip coming from?:

- How do you have a TDP of 180W for an entire wafer of chips?

- Why is there a peak FP32 number when they are clearly working with FP16?

Each of these chips is a completely different architecture and it makes no sense to compare them at this level. The only meaningful comparison is actual performance in applications because that reflects how the entire system will be used.

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#23

Huawei looks like it has a strong game here: "Ascend 910 is used for AI model training. In a typical training session based on ResNet-50, the combination of Ascend 910 and MindSpore is about two times faster at training AI models than other mainstream training cards using TensorFlow." https://www.huawei.com/en/press-events/news/2019/8/Huawei-As... edit: The software framework "MindSpore will go open source in the fir…

When I read about it first I wondered if it would be a mobile chip - but apparently not (with a TDP of 300w)

I wonder how brittle the performance will be vs other models such as transformers and DRL vs CNN and ResNet.

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#24
'''CONCLUSION Graphics has just been reinvented. The new NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture is the most advanced and efficient GPU architecture ever built. Turing implements a new Hybrid Rendering model that combines real-time ray tracing, rasterization, AI, and simulation. Teamed with the next generation graphics APIs, Turing enables massive performance gains and incredibly realistic graphics for PC games and professional applications.'''

Quoted from Nvidia Turing datasheet

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#25
post #15
post #3

I am surprised Amazon has not jumped in the game, renting out an accelerator like Google does with the TPUs

AWS gpu compute is extremely expensive. If this is due to datacenter licensing costs, I hope they come out with their own hardware soon to reduce these costs. If on the otherhand, it's because their value-add is not in renting out the hardware but burst scalability, then I'm less optimistic that they'd cannibalize their own cloud product. Currently, it only takes about 1 month to break even if you buy a consumer gpu…

That's because NVIDIA's EULA requires you to buy a NVIDIA Tesla in datacentre developments; and Teslas are marked up by thousands of dollars.

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#27

Some of the numbers in that table do not make any sense and makes me question the quality of the entire article. Where are the numbers for the Cerebras chip coming from?: - How do you have a TDP of 180W for an entire wafer of chips? - Why is there a peak FP32 number when they are clearly working with FP16? Each of these chips is a completely different architecture and it makes no sense to compare them at this level.…

One of the numbers that jumped out at me as being very unusual about the Cerebrus chip was this one: "Speculated clock speed of ~1 GHz and 15 kW power consumption."

15 kW power consumption for 1 chip?!?

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#29

Are deep neural networks really that widely applicable that it's profitable to design custom chips for them? What about other models of AI that involve, say, discrete math or graph search?

I don’t know whether it’ll be profitable, but MATMUL, for example, is useful for a variety of programs beyond propagation. My guess is most of this stuff will be packaged (e.g. Apple’s “neural engine” on their A-series SoCs).

Re: New chips for machine intelligence

#30
post #27

Some of the numbers in that table do not make any sense and makes me question the quality of the entire article. Where are the numbers for the Cerebras chip coming from?: - How do you have a TDP of 180W for an entire wafer of chips? - Why is there a peak FP32 number when they are clearly working with FP16? Each of these chips is a completely different architecture and it makes no sense to compare them at this level.…

One of the numbers that jumped out at me as being very unusual about the Cerebrus chip was this one: "Speculated clock speed of ~1 GHz and 15 kW power consumption." 15 kW power consumption for 1 chip?!?

It's a very big chip. Comes with fancy custom water-cooling to handle the heat, they say.
Post reply on HN