Start-up Builds World's Largest Chip with 1.2 Trillion Transistors
Cerebras Systems, a startup dedicated to accelerating Artificial intelligence (AI) computing, has unveiled the largest chip ever built. Optimized for AI work, the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) is a single chip that contains more than 1.2 trillion transistors and measures 46,225 square millimeters. The WSE is 56.7 times larger than the largest graphics processing unit which measures 815 square millimeters and has 21.1 billion transistors. The WSE also contains 3,000 times more high speed, on-chip memory, and has 10,000 times more memory bandwidth.
In AI, the chip size is profoundly important. Big chips process information more quickly, producing answers in less time. Reducing the time-to-insight, or “training time,” allows researchers to test more ideas, use more data, and solve new problems. Google, Facebook, OpenAI, Tencent, Baidu, and many others argue that the fundamental limitation of today’s AI is that it takes too long to train models. Reducing training time removes a major bottleneck to industry-wide progress. Click here to read more.
