Michael James, Co-Founder and Chief Software Architect at Cerebras, speaks at Data Driven NYC in February 2020 about their purpose-built AI supercomputer architecture.
Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2035
Quantum and optical computing remain 10 to 15 years away from production
“We think that because that's primary research, that, that's a good, ah, 10 to 15 years out, whereas what we looked to do was to take, ah, pre, ah, technology we could manufacture, maybe difficult, but all achievable, so we weren't trying to invent any new law …”
Insight
New computing workloads always demand purpose-built hardware
“When we look throughout the history of computing, it has never happened that a new important workload has come along, and the correct answer to that workload was to use some pre-existing equipment that had been designed to do something else”
Opinion
Von Neumann architecture might not be the right path for AI
“So, so maybe there's a sign that, that we're not on the right track with the architecture we have in, in von Neumann computers.”
Disclosure
Cerebras designed a chip as large as possible with interleaved memory
“We decided to build a machine that was as large as we could, that had memory interleaved directly with the computational substrate.”
Assertion Supported
The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine is the world's largest processor
“This is the world's largest processor.”
Assertion Supported
Cerebras's WSE is the first chip with over 1 trillion transistors
“It is the first part that has over a trillion transistors, and we're here, and at 1.2, and it has 400,000 sparse linear algebra cores on it.”