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Nvidia will almost certainly respond to this challenge with it's own specialized machine learning and inference chips. It's probably what Google, Facebook and o
by Nokinside 9y ago
Nvidia will almost certainly respond to this challenge with it's own specialized machine learning and inference chips. It's probably what Google, Facebook and others hope. Forcing Nvidia to work harder is enough for them.
Developing a new high performance microarchitecture for GPU or CPU is complex task.
A new clean sheet design architecture takes 5-7 years even for teams that have been doing it constantly for decades in Intel, AMD, ARM or Nvidia. This includes optimizing the design into process technology, yield, etc. and integrating memory architectures. Then there is economies of scale and price points.
Nvidia's Volta microarchitecture design started 2013, launch was December 2017
AMD's zen CPU architecture design started 2012 and CPU was out 2017.
- jacksmith21006 9y agoDo not see why Google would care what Nvidia is doing? Why would they?
- m3kw9 9y agoIf they do it better and cheaper they care
- jacksmith21006 9y agoGoogle is doing the entire stack so kind of hard for Nvidia to have a competitive product to the TPUs. But also Google is already doing the 2nd generation of the TPUs and would expect a third. The data of chips coming from 3rd parties are probably numbered. The dynamics of the industry changed where now the companies that are buying the chips have skin in the game with the cost of running the chips. Versus the old days Intel sold a chip to Dell who then sold it to someone else. It just makes sense for Google to do their own silicon at this point as saves them a ton of money. But also Google has the data to improve the chip that Nvidia just does not have.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago> Do not see why Google would care what Nvidia is doing? Why would they? But without the data and not doing higher layers of the stack how can Nvidia create a product that is competitive with the TPUs for inference?
- osteele 9y agoGoogle’s gen2 TPU was announced May 2017, and available in beta February 2018. That 2018.02 date is probably the appropriate comparison to Volta’s 2017.12 and Zen’s 2017 dates. EDIT: I’m trying to draw a comparison between the availability dates (and where the companies are now), not the start of production (and their development velocity). Including the announcement date was probably a red herring.
- Nokinside 9y agoI'm aware. Making a chip and making competitive chip are two different things. When Nvidia enters the market with specialized chip it's likely on completely another level in bandwidth, energy consumption and price per flop performance. They have so much more experience with this. * https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx4hafXDDq2EMzRNcy1vSUxtcEk/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx4hafXDDq2EMzRNcy1vSUxtcEk... * https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/04/10/ai-drives-rise-accelerated-computing-datacenter/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/04/10/ai-drives-rise-acce...
- brandmeyer 9y agoAnnouncing it to the world != start of design effort.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]