4 ms·

What a charmingly impractical product! I wonder what their yields are like. I am reminded of a recording of a Seymour Cray talk where he discussed some of the

What a charmingly impractical product! I wonder what their yields are like. I am reminded of a recording of a Seymour Cray talk where he discussed some of the challenges his company faced with actually manufacturing their computers. The challenges associated with physical packaging, cooling, and power were as much or more interesting to me than the computing capabilities of the resulting product. I bet there are similar interesting rabbit-holes w/ this product. I have some nostalgia for the past world of "supercomputers" that were actually purpose-built devices, rather than clusters of off-the-shelf hardware. Economics don't favor the purpose-built, for sure, but things like the old Connection Machines and Cray machines seem very romantic to me. This product seems a bit like an artifact from that time. Edit: I think the Cray talk I'm thinking about is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9VStbhplQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9VStbhplQ

fabiospampinato 5y ago
I think yields are ~100% actually, I've read the chip is architected in a way that if any of those cores doesn't work the rest of the chip still works.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I figured there would be spare silicon on the die. I guess I was thinking more about the raw yields and how much over-capacity was engineered into the product to handle real-world physics. There has to be some pretty impressive engineering behind this thing.
  - kasperni 5y ago
    1-2% over-capacity. ""Both Cerebras’ first and second generation chips are created by removing the largest possible square from a 300 mm wafer to create 46,000 square millimeter chips roughly the size of a dinner plate. An array of repeated identical tiles (84 of them) is built into the wafer, enabling redundancy.""
    - EvanAnderson 5y ago
      They're fabbing it at a 7nm process, too! This is really exciting stuff. This rabbit hole got me to this Anandtech article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16626/cerebras-unveils-wafer-scale-engine-two-wse2-26-trillion-transistors-100-yield https://www.anandtech.com/show/16626/cerebras-unveils-wafer-...
qayxc 5y ago
> I have some nostalgia for the past world of "supercomputers" that were actually purpose-built devices, rather than clusters of off-the-shelf hardware. From mainframes to supercomputers, these parts are still far from off-the-shell hardware. They might use components that share a common heritage with their COTS cousins (in that they're not being developed specifically for a single supercomputer), but from CPU to interconnects you won't be able to source the components as-is new on the free market. Everything is still customised to varying degrees to meet customer specs and -pricing. Packaging and cooling has been solved, btw. and the company indeed sells a "plug-and-play" system complete with software support for relevant software packages (e.g. TensorFlow and friends).
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  > They might use components that share a common heritage with their COTS cousins (in that they're not being developed specifically for a single supercomputer) That's what I'm talking about. This system isn't just new arrangement of off-the-shelf x86/x64-based CPUs or commodity GPU cores with exotic interconnects. > Packaging and cooling has been solved, btw. and the company indeed sells a "plug-and-play" system I'm aware that they have a product. My interest would be in hearing about how they solved their packaging, power, and cooling challenges. That's actually more interesting to me than the capabilities of the system to deliver neural network processing. There had to be a ton of fun engineering in figuring out how to make a system out of the raw technology.
  - richk449 5y ago
    It has been covered in the popular tech press: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/cerebrass-giant-chip-will-smash-deep-learnings-speed-barrier https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/cerebras... https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/processors/cerebras-giant-ai-chip-now-has-a-trillions-more-transistors https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/processor...

fabiospampinato 5y ago

I think yields are ~100% actually, I've read the chip is architected in a way that if any of those cores doesn't work the rest of the chip still works.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
I figured there would be spare silicon on the die. I guess I was thinking more about the raw yields and how much over-capacity was engineered into the product to handle real-world physics. There has to be some pretty impressive engineering behind this thing.
- kasperni 5y ago
  1-2% over-capacity. ""Both Cerebras’ first and second generation chips are created by removing the largest possible square from a 300 mm wafer to create 46,000 square millimeter chips roughly the size of a dinner plate. An array of repeated identical tiles (84 of them) is built into the wafer, enabling redundancy.""
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    They're fabbing it at a 7nm process, too! This is really exciting stuff. This rabbit hole got me to this Anandtech article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16626/cerebras-unveils-wafer-scale-engine-two-wse2-26-trillion-transistors-100-yield https://www.anandtech.com/show/16626/cerebras-unveils-wafer-...

qayxc 5y ago

> I have some nostalgia for the past world of "supercomputers" that were actually purpose-built devices, rather than clusters of off-the-shelf hardware. From mainframes to supercomputers, these parts are still far from off-the-shell hardware. They might use components that share a common heritage with their COTS cousins (in that they're not being developed specifically for a single supercomputer), but from CPU to interconnects you won't be able to source the components as-is new on the free market. Everything is still customised to varying degrees to meet customer specs and -pricing. Packaging and cooling has been solved, btw. and the company indeed sells a "plug-and-play" system complete with software support for relevant software packages (e.g. TensorFlow and friends).

EvanAnderson 5y ago
> They might use components that share a common heritage with their COTS cousins (in that they're not being developed specifically for a single supercomputer) That's what I'm talking about. This system isn't just new arrangement of off-the-shelf x86/x64-based CPUs or commodity GPU cores with exotic interconnects. > Packaging and cooling has been solved, btw. and the company indeed sells a "plug-and-play" system I'm aware that they have a product. My interest would be in hearing about how they solved their packaging, power, and cooling challenges. That's actually more interesting to me than the capabilities of the system to deliver neural network processing. There had to be a ton of fun engineering in figuring out how to make a system out of the raw technology.
- richk449 5y ago
  It has been covered in the popular tech press: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/cerebrass-giant-chip-will-smash-deep-learnings-speed-barrier https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/cerebras... https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/processors/cerebras-giant-ai-chip-now-has-a-trillions-more-transistors https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/processor...