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Nothing in software will ever beat an equivalent ASIC.
by dartos 3y ago
Nothing in software will ever beat an equivalent ASIC.
- postalrat 3y agoSure there is. Software is easy to change.
- dartos 3y agoBy “beat” I meant in performance. Obviously you can’t change an asic
- fragmede 3y agoan asic is fixed function, so it'll never be able to boot my pc and then be the CPU, even though an asic beats the pants off anything else computing Sha hashes for Bitcoin mining.
- dartos 3y agoBy “beat” I meant performance. Obviously an ASIC is not a general purpose machine like a cpu.
- fulafel 3y agoMost ASICs are cost or power optimizations.
- dartos 3y agoExactly. They’re much faster for their specific tasks and thus are more power efficient and potentially cost efficient
- fulafel 3y agoNo. Eg of the hardware discussed on the article, the Raspberry Pi uses an ASIC that's slow, cheap and low power vs the Intel or AMD chips. In some cases ASICs are faster than general purpouse CPUs, but usually not.
- LtdJorge 3y agoIs the LLM running on an ASIC for the Pi here? I dout it.
- fulafel 3y agoThe ARM cores and the VideoCore parts are all in the ASIC, it's a SoC type ASIC.
- LtdJorge 3y agoHmm, yeah it's a SoC, but not an ASIC. Maybe you mean APU? ASICs are circuits thst can only do one thing, CPU cores are definitely not that. Edit: an example ASIC the Pi has is the video encoder/decoder, with JPEG also supported. I think it's embedded in the GPU.
- fulafel 3y agoASIC just means it's an application specific IC (= chip), meaning it's fabbed for that specific product (like in this case the Raspberry Pi). A functional block like a JPEG codec contained therein is not an ASIC. Quoth wikipedia: "Modern ASICs often include entire microprocessors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, flash memory and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is often termed a SoC (system-on-chip)." What you're describing in the JPEG codec might be termed a fixed function IP block in semiconductor design terminology.