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  • jtd871 - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    Public employee (Ontario, Canada teachers in this case) pension funds are big institutional investors.
  • ksec - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    There are very limited information on Graph Core. How are they any different to other Machine Learning processors like TPU from Google or NPU within an Apple SoC.

    Will there be an in-depth article, or even a high level overview on Graphcore?
  • Yojimbo - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    It's very different from the NPU within an Apple SoC for a couple of reasons. Firstly those neural coprocessors on SoCs are generally CNN inference ASICs. CNN inference is simpler than training and something like Graphcore's chip is designed to accelerate more than just CNNs (in inference and in training). Secondly, Graphcore has built a scalable systems-level architecture, not just a chip that can be integrated in an SoC. It's (comparatively) much easier to build something like an NPU and integrate it into an SoC than it is to design a scale-out architecture.

    As far as the TPU, it's similar but there are differences in the implementation. You can go to www.nextplatform.com if you want to see some information on the TPU, graphcore, or other ai accelerators.
  • galeos - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    Citadel have got an interesting paper on arXiv where there attempt to analyse the Graphcore architecture via microbenchmarking. Worth a look: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.03413
  • JohnLeonard - Tuesday, January 5, 2021 - link

    Hi ksec, these resources may help give some insight into what Graphcore have done and how it differs in approach to the existing approaches to ML/AI workloads.

    https://www.graphcore.ai/resources/white-papers

    Feel free to reach out if you need any further information.

    thanks,
    John Leonard- Product Marketing Manager, Graphcore.
  • ksec - Wednesday, January 6, 2021 - link

    Thanks.
  • Yojimbo - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    Funding secured is often more an indication of how much hype there is for the people/product involved and how good of salesmen the people are. Take a look at MagicLeap and Theranos.
  • Yojimbo - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    Regarding $440m cash on hand. I wonder if that's really enough to design and produce a 3 nm chip.
  • TomWomack - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    Remember it's very much a step-and-repeat sort of chip - version 1 was 19*2^6 copies of a block comprising a core with a complete-16-FP-multiplies-per-cycle unit and 256kb of RAM, this version 2 is probably a larger number of copies of a very similar block. If you were asked to pick something that's not too hard to port to a new smaller process, you'd pick this.
  • Calin - Tuesday, January 5, 2021 - link

    Well, $440M is small change in the fab industry. And to produce a chip on 3 nm, Intel would give ten times that (as it probably already gave for the 10nm technology to small effect).
  • artifex - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link

    Colossus? Have they mentioned a "Forbin Project?"
  • lemurbutton - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link

    How do these compare to Nvidia's Ampere solutions? Is Nvidia in trouble? Is training moving towards these specialized chips?

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