3 ms·
It's so funny to see FP4.... I remember 20 years ago being asked what sort of HPC we needed in genomics, and the answer was basically, "lower precision, faster"
by epistasis 2mo ago
It's so funny to see FP4.... I remember 20 years ago being asked what sort of HPC we needed in genomics, and the answer was basically, "lower precision, faster" for the stuff I was working on. But FP4 is, well, almost comical.
One thing not on that comparison table: die size. If I'm understanding that correctly, it's about the same as the Rubin, but at 1/3 the number of NVFP4 PFLOPs. (The text disagrees with the table, I'm taking the table as truth, perhaps that's wrong...)
- nxtfari 2mo agoAgree, I remember when even half precision made its way into C# sometime around 2020 (I didn’t know much about ML then) and I thought, well I guess that’s a worthwhile tradeoff but I can’t imagine going lower. Lo and behold (1-bit Bonsai) how much lower you could go.
- jacquesm 2mo agoTernary?
- jeffbee 2mo agoKnuth's base-e proposal enters the chat. They were right about everything 50+ years ago, but they didn't have the budget for the right hardware, had to write conference papers and books instead.
- jacquesm 2mo agoI can totally see how ternary would work from a physical implementation perspective but I have a really hard time visualizing anything using base-e, can you explain how such a thing would work in practice?
- Razengan 2mo agoMaybe we have to do what quaternions did for complex numbers and jump straight from 2 to 4
- kroaton 2mo agoBut Bonsai is garbage.