16 ms·

I think the case here is a lot easier than the case for bitcoin mining. Bitcoin miners are so stupidly single purpose that development there doesn't help much.

by rocqua 6y ago

I think the case here is a lot easier than the case for bitcoin mining. Bitcoin miners are so stupidly single purpose that development there doesn't help much. Maybe in general it helps create an industry for designing and manufacturing ASICs. I suppose that might go into making ASICs for deep learning at some point.

saddlerustle 6y ago
Bitmain is one of TSMC's largest customers, and that absolutely has been reinvested by TSMC in developing more advanced fabrication techniques. Also bitcoin mining chips are actually a lot like deep learning chips in that it's a lot of simple operations scaled out. And indeed, Bitmain now produces deep learning chips too.
DaftDank 6y ago
Can bitcoin ASIC's (or ASIC's in general) be reprogrammed to do another task? I have always heard that they are only designed to do cryptographic hashing, but are they just fundamentally that way? Would programming them to do something else be impossible or very unfeasible?
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  ASICs are not reprogrammable. FPGAs are.
  - DaftDank 6y ago
    I'm not well versed in these things so excuse the stupid question, but is the 'code' that runs the chips somehow hard-wired into the chip essentially? I only know vaguely what FPGA's are from investing a little bit in Xilinx late last year, mainly because from what I read they seemed very important to AI implementation and development. What are the benefits of making ASIC's vs FPGA's? Is it a cost thing (i.e. the ASIC's are cheaper to make?)
    - UncleOxidant 6y ago
      The advantage of ASICs is that a design implemented in an ASIC is likely going to run faster than the same design implemented in an FPGA - usually significantly faster. FGPAs are flexible, but as such you trade performance for that flexibility. Developing an ASIC design is very expensive. There's usually many thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of dollars of NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering expenses). Whereas you could put your design into an FPGA for the cost of an FPGA board (typically a few hundred dollars to a few thousand - but you'll be able to use the same FPGA board for many different designs as the FPGA is reprogrammable) and the FPGA design software (which is often given away for free or deeply discounted by the FPGA vendors). So ASICs are for organizations with lots of money. FPGAs are accessible for hobbyists. FPGAs are also often used to test out a design that is eventually implemented in an ASIC. The crypto folks have mostly moved to ASICs for the higher performance.
    - warkdarrior 6y ago
      ASIC are more expensive to make, more performant per watt, and (a lot) less programmable.
    - slimsag 6y ago
      I also won't pretend I know anything here, so take what I say with a grain of salt. From what I understand, FPGAs provide a software method of essentially reprogramming the actual behavior of the physical circuit to perform different tasks. This means FPGAs are (to some extent) general purpose, it's just they are programmed to provide only one purpose at a time (compared to traditional CPUs or GPUs for example). ASICs on the other hand are circuits designed specifically for your application only, they cannot be reprogrammed and must be created specifically for your algorithm.
    - jagraff 6y ago
      To answer your first question - yes, ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) are generally hardwired - once the hardware is burned into the silicon, it can't be changed. On the other hand, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are, as the name suggests, reprogrammable. In order to allow this (in a useful way) FPGAs are built of a large variety of logic gates which can be connected together by the programmer to, essentially, simulate a pure hardware circuit. The tradeoff is that ASICs are (almost always) much faster at performing their specific task than an FPGA could be - I'm not sure of all the reasons, but you could imagine that there are many, many optimizations that you can do when designing pure hardware that don't transfer over to software-defined-hardware, because you have the FPGA intermediary there
glenstein 6y ago
>Bitcoin miners are so stupidly single purpose that development there doesn't help much. I would say there's a second piece here, too, which is that to the extent that it's driving any sort of research into more efficient practices, it's only in response to constraints of bitcoins own making, and there's every intention to immediately use up new capacity with additional bitcoin mining. What could have been an external net benefit to humanity will just be absorbed into the same things that absorbed prior capacity. I don't want to run all the way with that thought, though, because it can be the case that there's a net benefit to humanity nevertheless. But it makes me think of how Keynes promised that future efficiencies would bring a utopia in the form of dramatically scaling back the need to toil to fulfill basic needs and comforts, how that wasn't necessarily wrong, and how we ended up not taking that path just the same.

by rocqua 6y ago

saddlerustle 6y ago

Bitmain is one of TSMC's largest customers, and that absolutely has been reinvested by TSMC in developing more advanced fabrication techniques. Also bitcoin mining chips are actually a lot like deep learning chips in that it's a lot of simple operations scaled out. And indeed, Bitmain now produces deep learning chips too.

DaftDank 6y ago

Can bitcoin ASIC's (or ASIC's in general) be reprogrammed to do another task? I have always heard that they are only designed to do cryptographic hashing, but are they just fundamentally that way? Would programming them to do something else be impossible or very unfeasible?

UncleOxidant 6y ago
ASICs are not reprogrammable. FPGAs are.
- DaftDank 6y ago
  I'm not well versed in these things so excuse the stupid question, but is the 'code' that runs the chips somehow hard-wired into the chip essentially? I only know vaguely what FPGA's are from investing a little bit in Xilinx late last year, mainly because from what I read they seemed very important to AI implementation and development. What are the benefits of making ASIC's vs FPGA's? Is it a cost thing (i.e. the ASIC's are cheaper to make?)
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    The advantage of ASICs is that a design implemented in an ASIC is likely going to run faster than the same design implemented in an FPGA - usually significantly faster. FGPAs are flexible, but as such you trade performance for that flexibility. Developing an ASIC design is very expensive. There's usually many thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of dollars of NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering expenses). Whereas you could put your design into an FPGA for the cost of an FPGA board (typically a few hundred dollars to a few thousand - but you'll be able to use the same FPGA board for many different designs as the FPGA is reprogrammable) and the FPGA design software (which is often given away for free or deeply discounted by the FPGA vendors). So ASICs are for organizations with lots of money. FPGAs are accessible for hobbyists. FPGAs are also often used to test out a design that is eventually implemented in an ASIC. The crypto folks have mostly moved to ASICs for the higher performance.
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    ASIC are more expensive to make, more performant per watt, and (a lot) less programmable.
  - slimsag 6y ago
    I also won't pretend I know anything here, so take what I say with a grain of salt. From what I understand, FPGAs provide a software method of essentially reprogramming the actual behavior of the physical circuit to perform different tasks. This means FPGAs are (to some extent) general purpose, it's just they are programmed to provide only one purpose at a time (compared to traditional CPUs or GPUs for example). ASICs on the other hand are circuits designed specifically for your application only, they cannot be reprogrammed and must be created specifically for your algorithm.
  - jagraff 6y ago
    To answer your first question - yes, ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) are generally hardwired - once the hardware is burned into the silicon, it can't be changed. On the other hand, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are, as the name suggests, reprogrammable. In order to allow this (in a useful way) FPGAs are built of a large variety of logic gates which can be connected together by the programmer to, essentially, simulate a pure hardware circuit. The tradeoff is that ASICs are (almost always) much faster at performing their specific task than an FPGA could be - I'm not sure of all the reasons, but you could imagine that there are many, many optimizations that you can do when designing pure hardware that don't transfer over to software-defined-hardware, because you have the FPGA intermediary there

glenstein 6y ago

>Bitcoin miners are so stupidly single purpose that development there doesn't help much. I would say there's a second piece here, too, which is that to the extent that it's driving any sort of research into more efficient practices, it's only in response to constraints of bitcoins own making, and there's every intention to immediately use up new capacity with additional bitcoin mining. What could have been an external net benefit to humanity will just be absorbed into the same things that absorbed prior capacity. I don't want to run all the way with that thought, though, because it can be the case that there's a net benefit to humanity nevertheless. But it makes me think of how Keynes promised that future efficiencies would bring a utopia in the form of dramatically scaling back the need to toil to fulfill basic needs and comforts, how that wasn't necessarily wrong, and how we ended up not taking that path just the same.