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Article flaws: - ascribes demise of vector supercomputers to AI winter; false, supercomputers did just fine post-AI winter. It was Intel’s economies of scale a
by jonstewart 5y ago
Article flaws:
- ascribes demise of vector supercomputers to AI winter; false, supercomputers did just fine post-AI winter. It was Intel’s economies of scale and growing availability of open source software for managing clusters that eventually killed them.
- doesn’t discuss the M1 in any depth, just asserts it’s a vector supercomputer; false, not only does the M1 have a number of specialized units (beyond generic vector units) accelerating demanding tasks, it also has monster ILP, with 8-way integer dispatch and a huge reorder buffer.
- only discusses machine learning and implies it’s the primary workload; false, a lot of workload on a typical end user machine is video.
- celrod 5y agoWith 128 bit vectors, the M1 is less of a vector computer than the x86 competition, which all have 256-bit or 512-bit vectors. As you note, the firestorm core's real strength is in its scalar execution (and when it comes to the vector units, it can do twice the operations/cycle as the x86 competition, giving it comparable throughput even for vector workloads). So the M1 generally impressing people in its performance seems like it'd support the author's point, and anecdotes about it underwhelming would contradict it? Unless the author was referring to the specialized matrix multiply unit and neural engine?