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AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

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Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#41

Post by artemisart »

knowitnone wrote: post #32

NVIDIA is pretty established but there's also Intel, AMD, Google to contend with. Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer but nothing prevents these other companies from doing the same thing. Currently they are choosing not to because of wafer economics but if they chose to, Cerebras would pretty much lose their advantage. https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wse-3-ai-chip-la…

Correction: it's 8x the TFLOPS of a DGX (8 H100), not 1 H100. But it's true that if it stays at $3M it's probably too much and I don't think the memory bottleneck on gpus is large enough to justify this price/performance.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#42

Post by throwup238 »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #37
GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #6

Cerebras is well-known in the AI chip market. They make chips that are an entire wafer. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cerebras-chip-cs3

I'd bet that making a chip the size of the waver has the benefit on not losing any silicon to dicing the wafer up like a desktop or GPU chips coming from a wafer. Major downside is you need to either have a massive x and Y exposure size or break the wafer into smaller exposures which means your still needing to focus on alignment between the steps, and if a defect can't be corrected then is that wafer just scrap?

They fuse off sections of the wafer with defects just like other manufacturers do in monolithic CPUs (as opposed to chiplets like AMD).

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#43

Post by idiotsecant »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #6

Cerebras is well-known in the AI chip market. They make chips that are an entire wafer. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cerebras-chip-cs3

Making larger monolithic silicon doesn't get 2x as expensive to get 2x as large. Bigger silicon is massively more expensive. I'm not sure that making each piece require a large chunk of perfect wafer is a fantastic idea, especially when you're looking to unseat juggernauts who have a great deal of experience making high quality product already.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#44

Post by [deleted] »

knowitnone wrote: post #32

NVIDIA is pretty established but there's also Intel, AMD, Google to contend with. Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer but nothing prevents these other companies from doing the same thing. Currently they are choosing not to because of wafer economics but if they chose to, Cerebras would pretty much lose their advantage. https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wse-3-ai-chip-la…

[deleted]

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#45

Post by 7e »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #38
knowitnone wrote: post #32

NVIDIA is pretty established but there's also Intel, AMD, Google to contend with. Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer but nothing prevents these other companies from doing the same thing. Currently they are choosing not to because of wafer economics but if they chose to, Cerebras would pretty much lose their advantage. https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wse-3-ai-chip-la…

I think the wafer itself isn’t the whole deal. If you watch their videos and read the link you posted the wafer size allows them to stack them in a block with integrated power and cooling at a higher density than blades and attach enormous amounts of memory. Not including the system, cooling, cluster, etc seems like a relatively unfair comparison too given the node includes all of those things - which are very expens…

At the end of the day, Cerebras has not submitted any MLPerf results (of which I am aware). That means they are hiding something. Something not very competitive.

So, performance is iffy. Density for density sake doesn’t matter since clusters are power limited.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#46

Post by billconan »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #38
knowitnone wrote: post #32

NVIDIA is pretty established but there's also Intel, AMD, Google to contend with. Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer but nothing prevents these other companies from doing the same thing. Currently they are choosing not to because of wafer economics but if they chose to, Cerebras would pretty much lose their advantage. https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wse-3-ai-chip-la…

I think the wafer itself isn’t the whole deal. If you watch their videos and read the link you posted the wafer size allows them to stack them in a block with integrated power and cooling at a higher density than blades and attach enormous amounts of memory. Not including the system, cooling, cluster, etc seems like a relatively unfair comparison too given the node includes all of those things - which are very expens…

Can their system attach memory? from what I read, it doesn't seem to be able to: https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/1csquky/with_waf...

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#47

Post by throwup238 »

artemisart wrote: post #41
knowitnone wrote: post #32

NVIDIA is pretty established but there's also Intel, AMD, Google to contend with. Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer but nothing prevents these other companies from doing the same thing. Currently they are choosing not to because of wafer economics but if they chose to, Cerebras would pretty much lose their advantage. https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wse-3-ai-chip-la…

Correction: it's 8x the TFLOPS of a DGX (8 H100), not 1 H100. But it's true that if it stays at $3M it's probably too much and I don't think the memory bottleneck on gpus is large enough to justify this price/performance.

The company started in 2015 so I think they are (were?) banking on SRAM scaling better than it has in recent years.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#48

Post by kortilla »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #24
est31 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia's moat is real but not big enough that one can't surpass it with a lot of engineering. It's not the only company making AI accelerators, and this has been the case for many years already. The first TPU was introduced in 2015. Nvidia has just managed to get a leader position in the race.

Saying it's "just" a lot of engineering effort to catch up isn't wrong, but it understates the reality. There are very few organizations on earth that have the technical and financial resources to meaningfully compete with even small parts of Nvidia's portfolio. Nvidia's products benefit from that breadth of strengths and the volumes they ship. They don't just make accelerators, they'll sell you the hardware too (unl…

People said the same about Cisco, Intel, IBM etc. It will only be a matter of time for companies to eat into the high margin stuff for specific use-cases and grow from there.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#50

Post by phonon »

idiotsecant wrote: post #43
GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #6

Cerebras is well-known in the AI chip market. They make chips that are an entire wafer. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cerebras-chip-cs3

Making larger monolithic silicon doesn't get 2x as expensive to get 2x as large. Bigger silicon is massively more expensive. I'm not sure that making each piece require a large chunk of perfect wafer is a fantastic idea, especially when you're looking to unseat juggernauts who have a great deal of experience making high quality product already.

It is designed to handle defects.

https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wafer-scale-engine-ai-....

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