4 ms·
> Yet, what took them at least 5 years, and extremely expensive to make reticule limit chips, was bested by a no-name Chinese fabless that blew TPUs out of the
by ipsum2 9y ago
> Yet, what took them at least 5 years, and extremely expensive to make reticule limit chips, was bested by a no-name Chinese fabless that blew TPUs out of the water on power/cost/performance ratio.
I'm not familiar with what company or product you're referring to. What is it?
- baybal2 9y agoNovumind, they showed their engineering samples few months ago. And yes, they got quite close to their initial promise of 3 teraflops per watt. Cambricon - possibly a scam, though also claims performance on an equal level with moderately sound technical approach. They never released much info other than fancy CG videos.
- ipsum2 9y agoI can't find much information about Novumind (NovuTensor is their product) nor Cambricon. NovuTensor seems to be only doing inference , and only a specific type of inference (judging from their hardware, probably only images), which is a lot simpler to speed up than the training that TPUs do. I'd take the statement "Unknown Chinese company beating Google with fewer resources and less time" with a huge grain of salt.
- deepnotderp 9y agoFWIW, there are other small companies that have made amazing chips, like Adapteva and REX Computing.
- deepnotderp 9y agoUhhh. NovuMind only does 3x3 convolutions. Literally a hard burnt ASIC. Also, the TPU's efficiency is close. (Btw both their "FLOPs/watt " numbers are useless, they don't account for utilization) And Cambricon... well, I'll just leave it at that...
- baybal2 9y agoI don't think that relevant. For running NNs, this is pretty much all what you need from an asic hardware - raw floating point matrix multiplications per second. And measuring how much power it takes for it to do so is a good measure of power efficiency.
- deepnotderp 9y agoPretty sure the novumind chip has hard coded the Winograd 3x3 convolution algorithm.
- baybal2 9y agoYou seem to be pretty knowledgeable in the subject. Are you someone working in the field? IC designer?
- dgacmu 9y agopsst, click their username: "Founder of a deep learning chip startup called Vathys.ai (YC Winter 2018)." :) (Edited to answer the below question: Dave Andersen - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/ I'm back at CMU full time, but was having too much fun at Google to quit entirely.)
- deepnotderp 9y agoYup, guilty as charged :) EDIT: Question answered :)
- deepnotderp 9y agoYep, Vathys; W18