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Why "graft"? It's not something that's foreign to them. This promises to essentially double the performance of Intel chips on an increasingly important workload
by m0zg 7y ago
Why "graft"? It's not something that's foreign to them. This promises to essentially double the performance of Intel chips on an increasingly important workload, and also simplify the modeling work, because the models don't experience any accuracy drop when simply converted to bfloat16, unlike with quantization, where it's model dependent and finicky AF. I'd much rather do fp16 or bfloat16 at inference time, without constant pain that is quantization. I hope ARM, AMD and RISCV pay attention and implement this in the exact same way, so that models could be portable.
- exsf0859 7y agoI read this article as saying, "hey we can emulate bfloat16 pretty well in software on top of our existing hardware features". That's what "graft" and "minimal impact" mean to me. Intel (for better or worse) takes a very experiment-results-driven approach to choosing which features to implement in hardware. So this result -- that software emulation of a feature works almost as well as a hardware implementation would -- probably makes Intel less likely to implement the feature in hardware. ARM, AMD, RISCV etc, will probably come to similar conclusions.
- kristianp 7y agoThe article links to another saying that bfloat16 is coming to Xeons. Also the title of the current says it too. There's nothing implying less likely if you read the articles. https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/12/16/intel-unfolds-roadmaps-for-future-cpus-and-gpus/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/12/16/intel-unfolds-roadma...
- exsf0859 7y agoOuch, you're right! I misunderstood.