Re:Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI
by groundlogic on Monday August 19, 2019 @02:12PM
(#20740191)
Sure, that makes sense.
With this many cores it seems like the probability that a core dies during a multi-hour job (or in case it's used for inference, during a very long-lived realtime job) is pretty high, so the software in all layers would need to handle this kind of exception. They probably don't, today, since we haven't seen a 400k core chip before.
EDIT: to add a bit more and possibly address the original question (which I think keveman may have misunderstood), there will usually be some hardware dedicated to controlling the chip's redundancy. Part of that is often a OTP fuse-type thing that can be programmed during wafer test to indicate parts of the chip that don't work. Something (software or hardware) will read that during boot and not use those parts of the chip.