El Reg speculates about what GPUzilla really gets out of the deal
The subtitle does not give confidence that the author knows wtf they’re talking about.
To be fair, I think it’s to be expected that this speculation on their part (the clickbait headline notwithstanding).
The use of SRAM as an alternative to HBM/DRAM is news for me.
You can get around this by building a bigger chip – each of Cerebras’ WSE-3 wafers features more than 40 GB of SRAM on board, but these chips are the size of a dinner plate and consume 23 kilowatts. Anyway, Groq hasn’t gone this route.
That is insane electricity usage for 40 GB of memory.
It’s not just the RAM using all of that power, there’s also 900,000 processor cores in the chip. All of that SRAM is just cache memory.
This made me feel a bit dizzy reading that.
The line
I got me 100 GB of RAM
from Weird Al’s All About The Pentiums will need to be updated to 100 GB of cache.
Ok that makes more sense, I knew SRAM is relatively costly in terms of power consumption, but the 23 KW seemed like a lot for 40 GM of SRAM.
