Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Happening Now
Monday, March 18 Friday, March 15 Friday, March 8 Thursday, March 7 Wednesday, March 6 More Happening Now

Silicon

As promised, MLCommons added a large language model (based on GPT-3) to its MLPerf training suite (v3.0) and released the latest round of results yesterday. Only two chips took on the LLM challenge – Nvidia’s H100 GPU and Intel/Habana’s Gaudi2 deep learning processor – each showcasing different strengths. Not surprisingly, the newer H100 was the ... Full article
Cerebras is putting down stakes to be a player in the AI cloud computing with a supercomputer called Andromeda, which achieves over an exaflops of “AI performance.” The company called Andromeda one of the fastest AI systems in the U.S. The system strings together 16 CS-2 systems in a cluster, with a total of 13.5 ... Full article
In his GTC keynote today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang launched another new Nvidia GPU architecture: Ada Lovelace, named for the legendary mathematician regarded as the first computer programmer. The company also announced two GPUs based on the Ada Lovelace architecture – the workstation-focused RTX 6000 and the datacenter-focused L40 – along with the Omniverse-focused, L40-powered, ... Full article
Chipmaker Cerebras is patching its chips – already considered the world’s largest – to create what could be the largest-ever computing cluster for AI computing. A reasonably sized “wafer-scale cluster,” as Cerebras calls it, can network together 16 CS-2s into a cluster to create a computing system with 13.6 million cores for natural language processing. ... Full article
Groq has deconstructed the conventional CPU, and designed its chip in which software takes over control of the chip. The Groq Tensor Streaming Processor Architecture follows a growing trend of software controlling system functions, which has happened in autonomous cars, networking and other hardware. The architecture hands over hardware controls of the chip to the ... Full article
Intel has been hyping up its media delivery and cloud gaming GPUs codenamed Arctic Sound-M, and has given a formal name: Flex Series GPUs. The Flex Series GPUs will sit in the cloud data centers for AI inferencing and graphics – such as gaming and video – to remote devices. Intel's Vision conference in May ... Full article
Further evidence of the blossoming diversity of architectures offered in the cloud arrived this week with the news that Ampere Altra Arm-based processors have been added to Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure. Microsoft says the Arm-based instances, currently in preview, offer up to 50 percent better price-performance than comparable x86-based virtual machines (VMs) for scale-out workloads. “The ... Full article
For GPU-maker Nvidia, it was not supposed to end this way, with the company giving up on its grandiose plans to acquire chip IP vendor, Arm Ltd. But after more than 18 months of prying eyes from government agencies from the U.K., the European Commission, the United States and China, it appears that the Arm ... Full article
In a market still filling with fledging silicon chips, Ceremorphic, Inc. has exited stealth and is telling the world about what it calls its patented new ThreadArch multi-thread processor technology that will help improve new supercomputers. Venkat Mattela, the company’s founder and CEO of Ceremorphic, calls his latest chip design a Hierarchical Learning Processor (HLP), ... Full article
Nvidia’s 14-month-long, $40 billion proposal to acquire chip IP vendor Arm has hit another potential regulatory roadblock after being hit with two earlier challenges in Europe since October. This time it was the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which filed an administrative complaint on Dec. 2 to attempt to block the blockbuster transaction. The administrative ... Full article
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been added to the growing list of government agencies around the world that are reviewing the proposed $40 billion acquisition of U.K.-based Arm Ltd. by Nvidia. The FTC perusal was noted briefly by Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress on Nov. 17 as she presented the company’s recent Q3 ... Full article
Since coming online in the fall of 2019 in Paris, the Jean Zay supercomputer has been one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers available to HPC and AI researchers. And now, through the addition of new Nvidia A100 80GB GPUs and other hardware, the Jean Zay will soon offer double its present compute capacity for AI ... Full article
With antitrust and national security concerns continuing amid the proposed $40 billion acquisition of U.K.-based Arm Ltd. by Nvidia, the British government today (Nov. 16) ordered an in-depth, 24-week “Phase Two” investigation into the proposed deal. The U.K.’s deepened investigation, which will be conducted by the government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), follows a similar ... Full article
The British government will reportedly soon order an in-depth antitrust investigation into the proposed $40 billion Nvidia acquisition of Arm, following a similar investigation that was undertaken just three weeks ago by the European Commission. The coming action was reported Nov. 14 (Sunday) by The (London) Times, which stated that British officials are “poised to ... Full article
Wafer-scale compute vendor Cerebras Systems has raised another $250 million in funding – this time in a Series F round that brings its total funding to about $720 million. The latest cash infusion was led by Alpha Wave Ventures and Abu Dhabi Growth and includes participation by Altimeter Capital, Benchmark Capital, Coatue Management, Eclipse Ventures, ... Full article
Bringing large language model (LLM) capabilities directly to enterprises to help them expand their business strategies and capabilities is the focus of Nvidia’s new NeMo Megatron large language framework and its latest customizable 530B parameter Megatron-Turing model. Unveiled Nov. 9 at the company’s fall GTC21 conference, the new Megatron framework and the model itself were ... Full article
With its upcoming Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs, designed as the next generation of Intel Xeon CPUs after Ice Lake and slated for release in 2022, chipmaker Intel Corp. is hoping to drive AI performance to new heights – as much as 30x the performance of the existing Ice Lake chips. The company announced the 30x ... Full article
Hot on the heels of recent GPT language model product news from SambaNova, Microsoft and Nvidia, China-based Inspur AI Research has announced its Yuan 1.0 language model, which has 245.7 billion parameters and has undergone training using 5TB of datasets. What makes Yuan 1.0 different, however, is that it was built from the ground up ... Full article
The impacts of the chip shortage can be spotted everywhere: from higher prices on home appliances to empty new car lots to higher prices for consumer devices. Processor-hungry AI applications are feeling the pinch, but according to SambaNova’s CEO, hardware alone isn’t a determining factor in AI’s success. The roots of the current bottleneck in ... Full article
As IoT has soared in adoption and use, the IoT development process has stubbornly fallen behind, still requiring up to five years between a product concept and its eventual development and release on the market. That is not helping Internet of Things (IoT) device manufacturers and developers release new products, but it has been a ... Full article

EnterpriseAI