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Tinygrad will be the next Linux and LLVM

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Re: Tinygrad will be the next Linux and LLVM

#21
post #20

TinyGrad is GeoHot's system/compiler to map neural networks onto hardware. He consistently points out this one point: Because the exact number of cycles is know in advance, it can be scheduled, there's no need for branch prediction, or that type of thing in a CPU. Essentially, he wants to be able to express programs, and even an operating system, as a directed acyclic graph of logical binary operations, so that you c…

> he wants to be able to express programs, and even an operating system, as a directed acyclic graph of logical binary operations, so that you can have consistent and deterministic runtime behavior. So how is this different from digital logic synthesis for CPLD/FPGA or chip design we have been doing over the last decades?

FPGAs are (prematurely) optimized for the wrong things, latency and utilization. The hardware is heterogeneous, and there isn't one standard chip. Plus they tend to be expensive.

The idea is to be able to compile/run like you can now with your Von Neuman machine.

FPGA compile runs can sometimes take days! And of course, chips take months and quite a bit of money for each try through the loop.

Re: Tinygrad will be the next Linux and LLVM

#23

> Without CPUs, we can be freed from the tyranny of the halting problem. Can someone please explain to me what this even means in this context? Serious question.

Think of it as unwinding a program all the way until it's just a list of instructions. You can know exactly how long that program will take, and it will always take that same time.

But will it always solve the task? Because without that it it is trivially easy to “solve” the halting problem by just declaring that the turing machine halts after X steps.

Re: Tinygrad will be the next Linux and LLVM

#28

no it won't, because while hitting ioctls in python is cute https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/extra/hip_g... it is definitely not shippable

Umm, why not?

We wrote entire NVIDIA, AMD, and QCOM drivers in that style.

https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/ru...

https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/ru...

https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/ru...

Re: Tinygrad will be the next Linux and LLVM

#29
I generally don't read anything by gh but I think he is cryptically just referring to something like XLA, whereby your NN architecture gets compiled straight to hardware, say to a custom asic, or to an FPGA bit stream, etc.

It's definitely going to happen but I don't think it will replace CPU's much like human brains can't quite replace CPU's and what they are optimised for.

Trying to make out that TinyGrad is leading the charge in this is quite self indulgent.

Re: Tinygrad will be the next Linux and LLVM

#30

Well, neither Linux nor LLVM loudly proclaimed that they would be the next Internet or GUI. So I am inclined to believe that this will not be the case and the person doing the proclamation might be a little full of himself.

Interesting contrast to how Linux itself was first introduced:

"just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"

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