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AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

cnbc.com

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Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#51

Post by wmf »

billconan wrote: post #46
fnordpiglet wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think they do have external memory that they use for training.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#52

Post by winwang »

billconan wrote: post #46
fnordpiglet wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Surprising. DRAM (and more importantly high-bandwidth DRAM) seems to be scaling significantly better than SRAM -- and I'm not sure if that could be seriously expected to shift.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#53

Post by Der_Einzige »

alephnerd wrote: post #10
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

Yep! Them, SambaNova, and Groq are super exciting mid-late stage startups imo.

Shhhhh, stop telling the normies about the future!

And especially don't tell them to start looking into who "sovereign clouds" actually are!

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#54

Post by skeptrune »

kortilla wrote: post #48
AlotOfReading wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's something weird about the market right now in that all the AI budgets being used to by GPUs are loss-leading. Orgs are treating the spend as a waste anyways, so I suspect they aren't going to be looking to cut costs. Make Cerebras a hard sell imo.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#55

Post by dzhiurgis »

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…

> wafer economics

What are they?

Is this related to defects? Can't they disable parts of defective chip just like other CPUs do? Sounds cheaper than cutting up and packaging chips individually!

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#57

Post by dzhiurgis »

throwup238 wrote: post #16
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

Cerebrus made a great (now deleted) video on the whole computer hosting the wafer: https://web.archive.org/web/20230812020202/https://www.youtu... It’s fascinating.

TIL - web archive saves youtube videos

Wow 200k amps in a chip. Whole thing looks like an early computer from 50s.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#58

Post by ggm »

Wafer scale integration has been a thing since wafers. Yet, I almost never read of anyone taking it the full distance to a product. I don't know if it turns out the yield per die per wafer or the associated technology problems were the glitch, but it feels like a good idea which never quite makes it out the door.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#59

Post by desertrider12 »

ggm wrote: post #58

Wafer scale integration has been a thing since wafers. Yet, I almost never read of anyone taking it the full distance to a product. I don't know if it turns out the yield per die per wafer or the associated technology problems were the glitch, but it feels like a good idea which never quite makes it out the door.

They don't give yield numbers but this says that they get acceptable yields by putting extra cores on the silicon and then routing around the defective ones. https://cerebras.ai/blog/wafer-scale-processors-the-time-has...
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