Here is another view of the chip from IEEE Spectrum:
6 Things to Know About the Biggest Chip Ever Built
1 | The stats
As the largest chip ever built, Cerebras’s Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) naturally comes with a bunch of
superlatives. Here they are with a bit of context where possible:
Size: 46,225 square millimeters. That’s about 75 percent of a sheet of letter-size paper, but 56 times as large as the biggest GPU.
Transistors: 1.2 trillion. Nvidia’s GV100 Volta packs in 21 billion.
Processor cores: 400,000. Not to pick on the GV100 too much, but it has over 5000 CUDA cores and more than 600 tensor cores, both of which are used in AI workloads. (Fifty-six GV100s would then have more than 300,000 cores.)
Memory: 18 gigabytes of on-chip SRAM. Cerebras says this is 3,000 times as much as the GPU. But this is probably not a fair comparison as each GV100 works with 32 GB of high-bandwidth DRAM.
Memory bandwidth: 9 petabytes per second. According to Cerebras, that’s 10,000 times our favorite GPU, but it’s hard to see what the startup is measuring to get that number. As one reader pointed out,
this analysis gave one part of the GV100’s SRAM (the L2 cache) a throughput of 2155 GB/s, easily cutting Cerebras supposed lead in half.
2 | Why do you need this monster?
Startup Cerebras has built a wafer-size chip for AI, but it isn’t the only one possible
spectrum.ieee.org