3 ms·

A 1 Gigabit DRAM chip sounds far smaller than anything that's been used with GPUs in a very long time. That's a capacity from 15 years ago.

• utopcell 3y ago
  they probably don't use a single chip.
  • wtallis 3y ago
    That doesn't alleviate the capacity issue. Even if it's a 1Gbit chip with an 8-bit interface, then a 256-bit bus would only add up to 4 GB of DRAM at most. The ratio of capacity to bandwidth is just not anywhere close to what makes sense for ordinary GPU usage.
    • utopcell 3y ago
      This doesn't seem to be an ordinary GPU however. It needs to process input from all the sensors and produce some low-bw output (positioning, object detection from lidar etc). They probably have enough RAM to buffer/post-process whatever they need from the sensors.
      • wtallis 3y ago
        Right, I'm using the memory chip as strong evidence to argue that the R1 cannot be an ordinary GPU.
        • utopcell 3y ago
          Makes sense.
• phire 3y ago
  The capacity might be small, but with 256GB/s of bandwidth, that's right up there at modern GPU levels, roughly comparable to a RTX 4060. And that's apparently from single chip, the RTX 4060 needs 6 chips get equivalent bandwidth. Though for that exact reason, I'm really not sure I trust the "single chip" part of the rumour. That's a lot of bandwidth per chip and it seems more likely to have four memory chips, which would result in 2 GB of capacity.
  • wtallis 3y ago
    Having GPU-like bandwidth doesn't make a chip a GPU. > it seems more likely to have four memory chips, which would result in 2 GB of capacity. Four times 1 Gigabit is 4 Gigabit, which equals half a Gigabyte: 512 MB. Which was less than the high-end for a desktop GPU 15 years ago. I'm still not seeing any way that this memory configuration is remotely plausible for a GPU today even though it is comparable on one metric.