Hot Chips 2018 Symposium On High Functioning Chips

From EE Times

13 Hot Chips from Summer 2018

Startup Tachyum vies amongst Intel’s Xeon

CUPERTINO, Calif. — This year’s Hot Chips hosted 25 talks, xvi of them focused at to the lowest degree inward purpose on chips treatment artificial word jobs. They spanned a broad attain from ultra-low-power devices for the Internet of Things in addition to smartphones to power-hungry slabs of silicon for the information center.

Industry consolidation closed to the x86 made this microprocessor final result less interesting for a few years. But amongst the rising of auto learning, it’s acquire a hot location in 1 lawsuit again for engineers who specialize inward chip architectures.

Believe it or not, there’s to a greater extent than to the chip the world these days than deep learning. One speaker described a competition to supercede DRAM in addition to called for to a greater extent than talks on memories at the final result given the run inward option RAMs bubbling nether the surface.

For its part, Xilinx showed a major novel variant of the FPGA, geared for AI in addition to more. And attendees heard a telephone outcry upward to action to blueprint a whole novel computing architecture grouded inward security.

Keynoter John Hennessey, chairman of Alphabet, noted that the widely used technique of speculative execution had been vulnerable to side-channel attacks for twenty years earlier estimator architects at Google saw the opened upward door.

“It makes you lot wonder what else nosotros haven’t noticed … its amazing given the complexity of these products that they run in addition to thus good or run at all,” said Nathan Brookwood, analyst at Insight64 in addition to a veteran Hot Chips attendee.

In the next pages, nosotros highlight an array of interesting talks that nosotros did non write well-nigh inward the immediate aftermath of the event. We starting fourth dimension amongst a handful of them that impressed us every bit most bold inward their ambitions and/or creative inward their thinking.

Startup Tachyum was, no doubt, the boldest of all, exactly informal conversations named it the to the lowest degree probable to succeed. It aims to win sockets every bit a mainstream server processor in addition to an AI accelerator amongst its Prodigy chip whose cores it claims are “faster than a Xeon in addition to smaller than an Arm.”

The 7-nm 290-mm² chip amongst upward to 64 cores volition record out side yesteryear side year, delivering upward to two TFlops at four GHz, claims the company. Initially, it volition depend on a combination of server software that the companionship ported in addition to an emulator to run other code.

Data pump operators are non probable to add together a startup’s chip in addition to software to their x86 racks without major functioning boosts in addition to lots of testing. Analyst Brookwood expressed skepticism well-nigh the startup’s utilisation of VLIW, a technique that Intel failed to master copy amongst Itanium. If the chip gains whatever traction, Tachyum is probable to confront patent suits from giants such every bit Intel, he added....

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Here's their quick striking on NVIDIA:

xiii Hot Chips from Summer 2018 
Nvidia shows the prowess of its GPU server

Nvidia made its bid to expand from a chip to a arrangement provider amongst a tour of its DGX-2 in addition to the NVLink interconnect within it. It showed several benchmarks, including those below, inward which the DGX-2 outperformed a measure dual-GPU system.

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