Jason Dorrier in Singularity Hub:
Computer chips are a hot commodity. Nvidia is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, and the Taiwanese manufacturer of Nvidia’s chips, TSMC, has been called a geopolitical force. It should come as no surprise, then, that a growing number of hardware startups and established companies are looking to take a jewel or two from the crown.
Of these, Cerebras is one of the weirdest. The company makes computer chips the size of tortillas bristling with just under a million processors, each linked to its own local memory. The processors are small but lightning quick as they don’t shuttle information to and from shared memory located far away. And the connections between processors—which in most supercomputers require linking separate chips across room-sized machines—are quick too.
This means the chips are stellar for specific tasks. Recent preprint studies in two of these—one simulating molecules and the other training and running large language models—show the wafer-scale advantage can be formidable. The chips outperformed Frontier, the world’s top supercomputer, in the former. They also showed a stripped down AI model could use a third of the usual energy without sacrificing performance.
More here.
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