> any factor of 10 being a new science / new product category,
I often remind people two orders of quantitative change is a qualitative change.
> The thing that I’m really very skeptical of is the 2 month turnaround. To get leading edge geometry turned around on arbitrary 2 month schedules is .. ambitious. Hopeful. We could use other words as well.
The real product they have is automation. They figured out a way to compile a large model into a circuit. That's, in itself, pretty impressive. If they can do this, they can also compile models to an HDL and deploy them to large FPGA simulators for quick validation. If we see models maturing at a "good enough" state, even a longer turnaround between model release and silicon makes sense.
While I also see lots of these systems running standalone, I think they'll really shine combined with more flexible inference engines, running the unchanging parts of the model while the coupled inference engine deals with whatever is too new to have been baked into silicon.
I'm concerned with the environmental impact. Chip manufacture is not very clean and these chips will need to be swapped out and replaced at a cadence higher than we currently do with GPUs.
Having dabbled in VLSI in the early-2010s, half the battle is getting a manufacturing slot with TSMC. It’s a dark art with secret handshakes. This demonstrator chip is an enormous accomplishment.
Yeah and a team I’m not familiar with — I didn’t check bios but they don’t lead with ‘our team made this or that gpu for this or that bigco’.
The design ip at 6nm is still tough; I feel like this team must have at least one real genius and some incredibly good support at tsmc. Or they’ve been waiting a year for a slot :)
From the article:
"Ljubisa Bajic desiged video encoders for Teralogic and Oak Technology before moving over to AMD and rising through the engineering ranks to be the architect and senior manager of the company’s hybrid CPU-GPU chip designs for PCs and servers. Bajic did a one-year stint at Nvidia as s senior architect, bounced back to AMD as a director of integrated circuit design for two years, and then started Tenstorrent."
His wife (COO) worked at Altera, ATI, AMD and Testorrent.
"Drago Ignjatovic, who was a senior design engineer working on AMD APUs and GPUs and took over for Ljubisa Bajic as director of ASIC design when the latter left to start Tenstorrent. Nine months later, Ignjatovic joined Tenstorrent as its vice president of hardware engineering, and he started Taalas with the Bajices as the startup’s chief technology officer."
Not a youngster gang...
There might be a foodchain of lower order uses when they become "obsolete".
I think there will be a lot of space for sensorial models in robotics, as the laws of physics don't change much, and a light switch or automobile controls have remained stable and consistent over the last decades.