Earlier quoted context omitted.
In their defense, it’s because the article is (understandably) sparse on details about what makes the requirements of their ranking models different from image classification or LLMs. Unless you work in industry it’s unlikely you will have heard of DeepFM or ESMM or whatever Meta is using. And building out specialized hardware does lock you in to a certain extent. Want to use more than 128GB of memory? Too bad, your…
> Want to use more than 128GB of memory? Too bad, your $10B chip doesn’t support that. Which is probably why Meta is also buying the biggest Nvidia datacenter cards by the shipload. There is no need to run inference for a small model - say for a text-ad recommendation system - on an H100 with attendant electricity and cooling costs.
E.g. it's common to have a full-width accumulator and e.g. s16 gradients with u8 activations and s8 weights, with the FMA (MAC) chain of the tensor multiply operation post-scaled with a learned u32 factor plus follow-up "learned" notify, which effectively acts as a fixed-point factor with learned position of it's point, to re-scale the outcome to the u8 activation range.
By having the gradients by sufficiently wider, it's practical to use a straight-through estimator for backpropagation. I read a paper (kinda two, actually) a few months ago that dealt with this (IIRC one of them was more about the hardware/ASIC aspects of fixed-point tensor cores, the other more about model training experiments with existing low precision integer-MAC chips IIRC particularly for interference in mind). If requested, I can probably find it by digging through my system(s); I would have already linked it/them if the cursory search hadn't failed.