Nvidia and AMD are the major players in the CPU market right now but a startup called Cerebras Systems has just unveiled a prototype of the chip that they are working on called the Cerebras WSE. This is going to be the world’s largest chip with some serious specifications like 400,000 cores.
The chip makes the Nvidia V100 look like nothing at all the comparison gives you an idea of the sheer size of this thing. It is actually 56 times the size of the V100 chip. You can check out the comparison below to get a better idea of the scale.
The startup has been able to solve challenges that no one else has figured out yet and the chip features 1.2 Trillion transistors. that is very impressive indeed.
The Cerebras WSE has an area of 46,225 mm². All cores are optimized for AI workloads and it consumes 15KW of power. At this point, we are not sure what kind of cooling solution the startup is using to cool the chip but it has to be something revolutionary keeping in mind the number of cores this chip has the and amount of heat that is going to come out of this monster CPU.
According to the startup, the Cerebras WSE is around 1000 faster than traditional systems because communication can take place across the scribe lines instead of interconnect or DIMM, etc.
The Cerebras WSE features 400,000 Sparse Linear Algebra cores. Each core is flexible, programmable, and optimized for the computations for most neural networks. Programmability ensures the cores can run all algorithms in the changing machine learning field, which is constantly changing.
The CPU has 18GB of on-chip memory. All of it is accessible within a single clock cycle and it provides 9 PB/s memory bandwidth. That means 3000 times more capacity and 10,000 times higher bandwidth than the leading competitor.
