The world's largest chip finds a home inside the world's fastest AI computer

[Shawn Knight]

What just happened? Cerebras Systems over the summer unveiled an absolutely massive chip in the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine. With 1.2 trillion transistors on board, it is the largest chip in the world and now it has a home in the company’s latest system designed to accelerate deep learning.

Unveiled at the Supercomputing 2019 conference this week, the new CS-1 measures roughly 26 inches tall meaning three can fit in a single rack. It consumes 20kW of power, 4kW of which is dedicated to the cooling subsystem. A full 15kW is supplied to power the enormous chip with 1kW being lost to power supply inefficiencies.

The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine powering the CS-1 is 56 times larger than the biggest GPU ever made, has 78 times more cores, 3,000 times more on-chip memory and affords 33,000 times as much bandwidth. In other words, it is ridiculously fast. Plus, it works with open source ML frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow for increased flexibility.

Details on hardware specifics like clock speeds will be shared in the near future, the company said.

The CS-1 is also incredibly expensive. Specifics haven’t yet been revealed but a spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware that it’ll cost “several million.” Still, that isn’t deterring everyone as the Argonne National Laboratory already has one in its possession that it is using for cancer research and basic science experiments.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/82842-world-largest-chip-finds-home-inside-world-fastest.html

 

[MarkHughes]

>With 1.2 trillion transistors

Each time I read something like this I wonder how far back one has to go before this chip would have more transistors than existed in the whole world.

 

[Uncle Al]

Add a little chocolate and some marshmallows and you've got the makings of one high speed smores!

 

[Mr Majestyk]

What's the all core OC?

 

[scavengerspc]

Waiting patiently for the Laptop version.

 

[Hardware Geek]

Can't wait to see what they have in store for the next generation of this technology.

 

[amghwk]

In the days of people chasing after smaller and smaller chips, these guys are going the opposite way. Though admittedly, the goal of the use is different.

 

[Yynxs]

Yeah, but will it run Overwatch at 300 fps?

Think how fast it decrypts Bitcoin.

What's the current bank standard for encryption? 256? with some using 128? Interesting thoughts for nation state hacking.

 

[mbrowne5061]

What's the all core OC?

If you go for an all-core OC, it actually begins to out-clock the universe and de-syncs from reality, so you can't really measure it all that accurately.

 

[IAMTHESTIG]

Pretty cool...

Now let's see the heatsink.

 

[neeyik]

Now let's see the heatsink.

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https://secureservercdn.net/198.12.145.239/a7b.fcb.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/The-Cerebras-CS-1-Product-Overview.pdf

 

[skline00]

But can it play minecraft?

 

[Markoni35]

But can it play minecraft?

Exactly so! Or Crysis.

 

[captaincranky]

OK, let's face it,."but will it run Crysis", is a meme which has been run into the ground.

But I think, "how many instances of Crysis can it run simultaneously", may not be quite as cute or terse, but is still as whimsical.

 

[Markoni35]

OK, let's face it,."but will it run Crysis", is a meme which has been run into the ground.

But I think, "how many instances of Crysis can it run simultaneously", may not be quite as cute or terse, but is still as whimsical.

That's because Crysis 2 (not Crysis 3, which was a downgrade) had such a good graphics, that it ashamed most of the AAA games released even 10 years later. It's a rare case that top game graphics survive more than 3 years unchallenged. Those German (and Turkish) developers were just out of this world.