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IBM analog AI chip could give the Nvidia H100 a run for its money
- ilaksh 3y agoI thinks this type of paradigm shift is what will be needed for the next level of performance for AI. But it also seems like for that to be competitive with current methods, they need to reduce the size by a factor of 2-3 and also make bigger chips. I just feel like IBM has a track record recently of doing great research but not actually manufacturing anything. Kind of like Google.
- pjmlp 3y agoUsually IBM doesn't sell to the kind of HN crowd, rather people happy with Aix, IBM i and z/OS, DB2, cloud for mainframes, own JVM implementations, Java EE servers, offshoring services,... Some of the research does end in such products, that are outside HN radar, because IBM isn't cool, yet many HN startups won't achieve a legacy like it and still be pumping money like IBM, even for boring business.
- ginko 3y ago>are outside HN radar, because IBM isn't cool More like outside people's radar because IBM only sells to big companies.
- wil421 3y agoI would bet a large portion of software engineers work in Big Companies. FANG employees comment regularly here and they work for the biggest companies in Tech.
- pjmlp 3y agoThose are the cool ones, the "do no evil" stuff.
- ginko 3y agoEven in a FANG you can't just walk to your manager and tell them to get a mainframe so you can play around with z/OS.
- wil421 3y agoNo one will let you play with a mainframe. I’ve worked for finical services companies and toured a data center with large IBM mainframes I wasn’t allowed to get close to much less touch the software. I’m sure if I wanted to move to the team it would’ve been possible to play with z/OS.
- pjmlp 3y agoIn 1994's Summer I was doing AS/400 backups during my internship. It is a matter of being on the right team.
- ethbr1 3y agoI feel like the irony here is that for all the fences most companies put around their mainframes... at the end of the day and inside the fence it's usually 1-2 people running everything who still know how to hack JCL et al.
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- magic_man 3y agoIBM revenue has been shrinking over the last 10 years. They aren't selling well.
- pjmlp 3y agoMany companies would dream of a revenue with that many digits.
- dragonwriter 3y agoYes, IBM reached a peak in the past from which a gradual fall still leaves them raking in money from largely legacy enterprise clients for a very long time. That doesn't make them competitive in new markets, though.
- pjmlp 3y agoUnfortunately I won't be around to check on it, lets see in 100 years who would still be around.
- mathisfun123 3y agoYour repeated discount of "it's shrinking and has been shrinking" with "we just don't know" is like saying that because you won't be around in 100 years you also can't make claims about whether the sun will come up. I won't be around in 100 years either but I am sure IBM won't survive for the same reason I'm sure the sun will rise: all rigorous analysis today indicates it.
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- bawolff 3y agoI don't think anyone disputes that ibm is the heir to an impressive tech empire. In its day it was definitely something. They just haven't done a whole lot lately, and most of what they have done is support people locked into their legacy solutions.
- mhh__ 3y agoAs far as I'm concerned that's a bug not a feature for them.
- phreeza 3y agoThe closest equivalent Google has is the TPU which is very much a manufactured thing at large scale.
- Legend2440 3y agoTPUs are a lot more like GPUs, they're just a bunch of tensor cores and high speed memory. The chip in the article gains its advantages from doing the compute directly in the memory cells. It saves power by moving information around less.
- phreeza 3y agoYea I'm just saying it's not like all hardware projects that Google does are "great research but not actually manufacturing anything." as claimed by OP.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoJust a laymen here, but if the organic brain is something we're trying to model I always ached for some kind of analog processor for things like neural networks. Op-amps, not logic gates. (Quick google found this fun hobbyist article of a perceptron built with op-amps: https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/the_perceptron_circuit https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/the_perceptron_ci...)
- PeterisP 3y agoWe're not really trying to model the organic brain; while some structures are somewhat inspired by some structures in the brain, the current learning structures are fundamentally quite different from biological brains. While there is a bunch of research for modeling organic brains, IMHO it is primarily driven by neuroscience trying to understand how humans work, and not directly applicable to making computation more efficient.
- dleeftink 3y agoBut wouldn't some computations be more efficient it they could run on brain-like synapses/clusters or hardware analogs thereof? Pattern recognition, multi-modal perception and such.
- refulgentis 3y agoMaybe? This presupposes we know how the brain works (we don't). Then you can kind of walk it to "but what if it kinda worked like [my understanding of how the brain works], would it be more efficient?", but it's not really clear what conversation we're having at that point.
- tikkun 3y agoI wonder how many years (if ever) it'll be before it's available for purchase, and I wonder what architecture Nvidia will be on by then - it won't be Hopper.
- johndough 3y agoThe actual nature paper mentioned in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06337-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06337-5 IBM blog post: https://research.ibm.com/blog/analog-ai-chip-low-power https://research.ibm.com/blog/analog-ai-chip-low-power Also I'd like to mention that those chips are for inference only. You still need GPUs for training.
- nine_k 3y agoCompact, low-power chips to run ML inference on stuff like vision, image generation, high-quality voice synthesis, maybe even translation and LLM stuff, would be very welcome. Imagine a good inference engine right in a phone.
- jacknews 3y ago"can model up to 17 million parameters" So about about 1000x away from being useful? Most current models are billions not millions.
- bob1029 3y agoNeuromorphic hardware is more about action potentials per unit time than raw parameter count.
- samstave 3y agoELI5 Please
- bob1029 3y agoI'd start with the wikipedia article on spiking neural networks.
- dontwearitout 3y agoBut unless it can directly or indirectly support current transformer architectures (with their huge parameter counts), it's going to critically struggle with adoption.
- variants 3y agoDid they buy mythic maybe https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/09/mythic_analog_ai_chips/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/09/mythic_analog_ai_chip...
- Gravityloss 3y agoAnd how about implementing this directly on the camera sensor? Before the A/D conversion.
- fidotron 3y agoArguably that is what the Foveon sensor did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor There is a book called The Silicon Eye about the history, and not coincidentally Carver Mead also wrote a book on neuromorphic analog neural network implementation back in the 80s.
- Gravityloss 3y agoHmm all I've seen about Foveon is just stacked RGB sensing. Ie there is no computation involving multiple pixels or anything like that.
- fidotron 3y agoOutside of the books I mention the Foveon information online is bad and deteriorating. I mean they don’t seem to mention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Mahowald https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Mahowald From what I recall there are analog feedback stages between adjacent cells, and that was a ongoing theme throughout the work of the teams around Mead. His neuromorphic book is almost entirely about doing that to sound and images. As an aside the Foveon cameras are worth experiencing. They are amazingly slow, the colours go wrong in less than perfect lighting (the stacked filter) but the edges on objects in resulting images have a definition that you only realize bayer filters completely destroy when they are gone.
- verall 3y agoDo you have an example or can expand on what you mean about the last point? Isn't sharpness mostly limited by the lens systems in modern cameras rather than the Bayer sensor resolution?
- hiddencost 3y agoRule of thumb: IBM tends to spoof results to get published, then use the published results to trick tech-illiterate clients into using their stack. At conferences I used to go to, they'd just phack the hyperparameters of an ensemble model on the benchmark sets, and put out a press release saying they were state of the art. They were mostly ignored by the academics who went to the talks on the actual novel work.
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- whinvik 3y agoI have become pretty wary of all headlines touting how a new chip is going to dethrone Nvidia. The problem with every hardware company is that they ridiculously underestimate software. I think the only way a company is going to start competing is by being software first. Make the software so good and easy to use that every one wants to use it. Only then is the hardware going to compete.
- brudgers 3y agoIBM has a long history of competent software development, hardware development, and product development. This isn't a kickstarter. It's backed by published research as was the case for relational databases.
- bawolff 3y agoEmphasis on "long", as in long time ago, as in before many of us were born. Modern IBM isn't what it once was. Edit: to clarify i mean on the software side. I don't know enough about the hardware side to comment.
- andrewpolidori 3y agoModern IBM is at the forefront of modern chip design. They regularly publish some of the most advanced research in the world, and are part of the industry consortium driving those changes.
- dragonwriter 3y agoHow often do they deliver viable new commercial products? Or are they for “modern chip design” what Google is for “modern AI models”?
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- abeppu 3y ago> The 14nm analog chip mimics the human brain I do with that at least _tech journalism_ outlets would develop a habit of asking at least one followup question when a PR says that something is like the human brain. Having analog values between zero and one is not at all particular to the human brain, or any brain, where we have spikes occurring at varying rates, not scalar activation levels. This chip could equally well be described as having components which mimic a dimmer switch, or perhaps a gas gauge that varies between empty and full. Yes, that's cool. No, it's not really brain-like.
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- maxlin 3y agoThis does sound very intriguing. Even if it would only take away some inference load when it becomes viable. Has a non-zero chance of spawning the next leap in computing? Considering IBM likely isn't going to crater in stock like some riskier bet might, and even if it's just to benefit from initial hype, I don't see a negative in moving chips I have laying around to big blue even though I very rarely do trades nowadays.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- josemanuel 3y agoWasn’t this what Mythic was after?