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No. 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
by fulafel 3y ago
No. 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.
- dartos 3y agoThat’s weird that Wikipedia says there’s no real distinction between SoCs and ASICS. Colloquially, I’d never call anything with a programmable processor an ASIC
- fulafel 3y agoSome ASICs are SoCs. Some are not.
- LtdJorge 3y agoFirst paragraph of that Wikipedia article: An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC /ˈeɪsɪk/) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec.
- dartos 3y agoI think we’re saying the same thing here. You can make an ASIC which doesn’t have the same power draw as a CPU, but provides the same performance. It doesn’t need to be faster than the fastest software implementation, but power per performance will always favor ASIC.