Spoken in your best Norma Desmond voice: "7nm was always good. It was the competition that got bad"...
cf: https://www.tsmc.com/english/newsEvents/blog_artic... It's hard to be certain, but TSMC ran 1.1M 7nm wafers in 2019. 2018 was ~.36M. So total number of wafers ever run is maybe ~2.5M? Then area of a wafer is 70 000mm^2. Total area capacity comes to ~177 B mm^2
Point of this calculation is what's the average area of a chip? Obviously there are very big ones, up to ~700 mm^2. And very small ones (but no-one is making tiny chips on an expensive leading edge process). Average is probably a little larger than an A13, say ~100mm^2? Throw in scribe lines, circular edges, test wafers, and worst case yield is maybe 80%. Perhaps quite a bit higher -- the wafer numbers are very much guesses and could be 2M or less?
It would NEVER be good for someone to have better PC power than USA. PERIOD. Cut off your nose to spite your face I guess? Even with Obama as president (hated his policies), I rooted for his success. Well, not in destroying the country like he tried, but I mean in getting it RIGHT. I rooted for him to make the country MONEY and keep it SAFE, but he spent like crazy and lit the world and USA on fire with constant division and screwing allies right and left (black vs. white, heck every chance they got they made group vs. group).
That said, I would never have wished for his administration to have crap computing power vs. others. We would lose a lot of crap if someone ever beats USA in tech. It's just dumb to wish for USA to do bad in any case. IF USA loses anything, everyone loses. WE are why YOU are not being run over, no matter where you are in the world. Vote for USA, or you are basically voting for your future problems. See our ships heading to S China sea? That's us defending YOU...and us, LOL, but you get the point, we lose you all lose the only question is how long it takes for you to CRY about it, and if you can recover once you pull your head out and VOTE USA again...LOL
IE, Obama screwed middle east. Now Trump is bringing them all back together (israel, UAE, etc) and not bombing everyone in sight. Dems wanted a president that wouldn't start all kinds of wars. Well look at that, you got one...But you've been trying to derail him every since...ROFL. He's trying to make peace with everyone, but you hate him...ROFL. Lowest everyone unemployment until Covid, but you hate him. Best economy EVER, but you hate him. I could go on, but people keep wanting to cut off their nose to spite their face...LOL. Rooting for your president to fail is massively stupid.
Campaign started. Sock puppet accounts everywhere. Dime a dozen. Unfortunately AT has an antiquated comment section from before report buttons and such were invented, when ARPANET was all a very trusted place.
I love commenters who randomly change the topic to Trump. It's even better when they try to claim that Obama did all the things that Trump is actually doing in real time at this specific moment. It's better still when they appear to be having an argument with an imaginary frienemy. It's the absolute best, though, when they go on to claim that Trump is curing the world of AIDS with his magical unicorn farts. It tickles me.
Thanks, TheJian, for being today's Clown Of The Hour.
US is an international laughing stock now more than ever, each year for the past four years it's getting worse and worse. I'm rooting for Trump to win. BTW. I'd be glad to see him succeed in what he's been doing. Better for the rest of the world.
>15U unit in order to power a single chip. Power consumption was in the 15 kW range
For us pathetic cooling clowns apparently, can we get a peak inside this montronsity? Is it some fanatical integrated-air-conditioner or just a massive cold-plate and plumbing-sized water cooling?
OK, answered my own question: liquid cooling. They call the power & cooling systems as the "Engine Block", appropriately.
"The CS-1 is an internally water-cooled system. Like a giant gaming PC on steroids, the CS-1 uses water to cool the WSE, and then uses air to cool the water. Water circulates through a closed loop internal to the system.
Two hot-swappable pumps on the top right move water through a manifold across the back of the WSE, cooling the wafer and warming the water. Warm water is then pumped into a heat exchanger. This heat exchanger presents a large surface area for the cold air blown in by the four hot-swappable fans at the bottom of the CS-1. The fans move air from the cold aisle, cool the warm water via the heat exchanger, and exhaust the warm air into the warm aisle."
Your observation is nothing new "Arbie". For the last 35 years, remember 30 years ago when computers this powerful were massive, cost millions & required 100x the power. See history of: IBM et. al. from 1950's onward; early Cray and other supercomputers onward.
mainframes have been downsized than PCs as process nodes have fallen. IBM, mostly, does it's own building, considering that the z ISA can't go away. DASD, however, has been commodity 'PC' drives emulating CKD for decades. these days most IBM 'mainframes' will fit inside the envelope of a generous CEO desk, and be air-cooled as well. still cost a million or so Bongo Bucks.
supercomputers still cost a dear amount. the only real difference is that the problems that supercomputers tend to do, nucular bombs and weather, are embarassingly parallel, so work just fine with thousands of Xeons in a cabinet. IBM never had much of a footprint in supers from the 360 on.
How does Ceberas feed the huge data from memory to this wafer with reconfigurable connection computing engines? Does the benchmark comparison with any details of the platform (box) configuration (or assuming all data are in the local engine unit's memory already)?
As to the 'how' - I'd guess that's what the rest of this box's internal bulk is mainly for (when subtracting out the space needed for supplying power to, and cooling of, 15 KW worth of compute...) Probably full of additional processors, network cards, storage, etc. - there just to manage and feed the beast.
This sort of thing is the future of computing. Maybe it will be more like a computing cube than a wafer though, with heat transfer layers interspersed with the compute layers.
When bathing wafers, you can't just add more mold areas, so the only way is to optimize the mold surface on the core and take advantage of the smaller nodes of the process. That means for TSMC 7 nm, there are now 850,000 cores and 2.6 trillion transistors. <a href="https://forcrack.com/apowermirror-crack/">... Crack</a>
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Eulytaur - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
7nm is *that* good now? Wow okayLoki726 - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
One small step towards ingot-scale computing...SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
It is when you have a placemat-sized chip.tipoo - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
I mean, sorta? It's effectively doing waver scale redundancy, it can work with some of the chips disablednandnandnand - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
Like tipoo said, it's made to work around defects. IIRC the stated core count is less than the amount on the chip.But even with that, TSMC 7nm yields are very good.
name99 - Thursday, August 20, 2020 - link
Spoken in your best Norma Desmond voice:"7nm was always good. It was the competition that got bad"...
cf:
https://www.tsmc.com/english/newsEvents/blog_artic...
It's hard to be certain, but TSMC ran 1.1M 7nm wafers in 2019. 2018 was ~.36M.
So total number of wafers ever run is maybe ~2.5M?
Then area of a wafer is 70 000mm^2.
Total area capacity comes to ~177 B mm^2
Point of this calculation is what's the average area of a chip? Obviously there are very big ones, up to ~700 mm^2. And very small ones (but no-one is making tiny chips on an expensive leading edge process). Average is probably a little larger than an A13, say ~100mm^2?
Throw in scribe lines, circular edges, test wafers, and worst case yield is maybe 80%. Perhaps quite a bit higher -- the wafer numbers are very much guesses and could be 2M or less?
brucethemoose - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
This thing will have more SRAM than my phone has flash.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
seems like the opportunity for our frenemies to build a machine to outwit the NSA's best. that may be good or bad, depending who's sitting at 1600.TheJian - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
It would NEVER be good for someone to have better PC power than USA. PERIOD. Cut off your nose to spite your face I guess? Even with Obama as president (hated his policies), I rooted for his success. Well, not in destroying the country like he tried, but I mean in getting it RIGHT. I rooted for him to make the country MONEY and keep it SAFE, but he spent like crazy and lit the world and USA on fire with constant division and screwing allies right and left (black vs. white, heck every chance they got they made group vs. group).That said, I would never have wished for his administration to have crap computing power vs. others. We would lose a lot of crap if someone ever beats USA in tech. It's just dumb to wish for USA to do bad in any case. IF USA loses anything, everyone loses. WE are why YOU are not being run over, no matter where you are in the world. Vote for USA, or you are basically voting for your future problems. See our ships heading to S China sea? That's us defending YOU...and us, LOL, but you get the point, we lose you all lose the only question is how long it takes for you to CRY about it, and if you can recover once you pull your head out and VOTE USA again...LOL
IE, Obama screwed middle east. Now Trump is bringing them all back together (israel, UAE, etc) and not bombing everyone in sight. Dems wanted a president that wouldn't start all kinds of wars. Well look at that, you got one...But you've been trying to derail him every since...ROFL. He's trying to make peace with everyone, but you hate him...ROFL. Lowest everyone unemployment until Covid, but you hate him. Best economy EVER, but you hate him. I could go on, but people keep wanting to cut off their nose to spite their face...LOL. Rooting for your president to fail is massively stupid.
5080 - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
delusional?close - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
Campaign started. Sock puppet accounts everywhere. Dime a dozen. Unfortunately AT has an antiquated comment section from before report buttons and such were invented, when ARPANET was all a very trusted place.Spunjji - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
I love commenters who randomly change the topic to Trump. It's even better when they try to claim that Obama did all the things that Trump is actually doing in real time at this specific moment. It's better still when they appear to be having an argument with an imaginary frienemy. It's the absolute best, though, when they go on to claim that Trump is curing the world of AIDS with his magical unicorn farts. It tickles me.Thanks, TheJian, for being today's Clown Of The Hour.
vladx - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
Nice propaganda piece.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
with any luck, Biden will just release all the NSA and CIA intercepts of Trump, et al chit chatting with Putin and his friends.dotjaz - Thursday, August 20, 2020 - link
Stupid?dotjaz - Thursday, August 20, 2020 - link
US is an international laughing stock now more than ever, each year for the past four years it's getting worse and worse. I'm rooting for Trump to win. BTW. I'd be glad to see him succeed in what he's been doing. Better for the rest of the world.ikjadoon - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
>15U unit in order to power a single chip. Power consumption was in the 15 kW rangeFor us pathetic cooling clowns apparently, can we get a peak inside this montronsity? Is it some fanatical integrated-air-conditioner or just a massive cold-plate and plumbing-sized water cooling?
OK, answered my own question: liquid cooling. They call the power & cooling systems as the "Engine Block", appropriately.
https://i.imgur.com/5RHugOv.png
ikjadoon - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
"The CS-1 is an internally water-cooled system. Like a giant gaming PC on steroids, the CS-1 uses water to cool the WSE, and then uses air to cool the water. Water circulates through a closed loop internal to the system.Two hot-swappable pumps on the top right move water through a manifold across the back of the WSE, cooling the wafer and warming the water. Warm water is then pumped into a heat exchanger. This heat exchanger presents a large surface area for the cold air blown in by the four hot-swappable fans at the bottom of the CS-1. The fans move air from the cold aisle, cool the warm water via the heat exchanger, and exhaust the warm air into the warm aisle."
https://www.cerebras.net/product/#explorer-3
FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
ah, com'n. this is kiddie kooling. big boy cooling uses full immersion in inert liquid.Spunjji - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
Ooooh. Chonky!Fozzie - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
Ian- Why are you not trying to take a bite out of it???Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 20, 2020 - link
I have that picture posted elsewhere. Mixing it up a bit :)Arbie - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
Tech post in 2040: "Remember when computers this powerful were massive affairs, cost millions and required 15KW of power?"tygrus - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
Your observation is nothing new "Arbie". For the last 35 years, remember 30 years ago when computers this powerful were massive, cost millions & required 100x the power. See history of: IBM et. al. from 1950's onward; early Cray and other supercomputers onward.Arbie - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
That was, ummm, the point "tygrus". Next time I'll put in a special note for you.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link
mainframes have been downsized than PCs as process nodes have fallen. IBM, mostly, does it's own building, considering that the z ISA can't go away. DASD, however, has been commodity 'PC' drives emulating CKD for decades. these days most IBM 'mainframes' will fit inside the envelope of a generous CEO desk, and be air-cooled as well. still cost a million or so Bongo Bucks.supercomputers still cost a dear amount. the only real difference is that the problems that supercomputers tend to do, nucular bombs and weather, are embarassingly parallel, so work just fine with thousands of Xeons in a cabinet. IBM never had much of a footprint in supers from the 360 on.
Spunjji - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
NoicePatotoChaos - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link
How does Ceberas feed the huge data from memory to this wafer with reconfigurable connection computing engines? Does the benchmark comparison with any details of the platform (box) configuration (or assuming all data are in the local engine unit's memory already)?boeush - Friday, August 21, 2020 - link
As to the 'how' - I'd guess that's what the rest of this box's internal bulk is mainly for (when subtracting out the space needed for supplying power to, and cooling of, 15 KW worth of compute...) Probably full of additional processors, network cards, storage, etc. - there just to manage and feed the beast.twtech - Sunday, August 23, 2020 - link
This sort of thing is the future of computing. Maybe it will be more like a computing cube than a wafer though, with heat transfer layers interspersed with the compute layers.cgeorgescu - Sunday, August 23, 2020 - link
Does it play Crysis?forcrack - Wednesday, August 26, 2020 - link
When bathing wafers, you can't just add more mold areas, so the only way is to optimize the mold surface on the core and take advantage of the smaller nodes of the process. That means for TSMC 7 nm, there are now 850,000 cores and 2.6 trillion transistors.<a href="https://forcrack.com/apowermirror-crack/">... Crack</a>