Re:Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine Gen2 7nm 2.6T Transistors
by jecel on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @02:57PM
(#24214606)
I think it is important to separate the several technical failures in wafer scale from the commercial one: Sinclair's Anamartic worked exactly as planned but the prices for conventional hard disks began to drop and that caused investors to pull out.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3043/Anamartic-Wafer-...
The problem is that the real project was a massively parallel computer just like the Cerebras (scaled to 1989 technological limits) and the disk replacement was just a way to develop the needed techniques and finance further developments. If the investors had had a little more patience then computing in the 1990s might have been a bit more interesting.
Re:Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine Gen2 7nm 2.6T Transistors
by gridlockd on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @05:38AM
(#24208682)
Another possibility is that the company will just fail, because it can not offer an advantage over commodity chips.
Re:Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine Gen2 7nm 2.6T Transistors
by segfaultbuserr on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @09:42AM
(#24210253)
I already mentioned it,
> even if this approach is workable (which remains a question)
No need to repeat.
People have been trying Wafer-Scale Integration [0] since the 1970s, there was quite some hype of building a "super chip" back at that time [1], but all efforts failed miserably. Cerebras' success is only the beginning, even if this approach is workable (which remains a question), there's still at least a decade to go from a HPC-specific chip to a general-purpose chip. Another possibility is that WSI will forever be a technology used in massively-parallel computers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer-scale_integration
[1] Giant microcircuits for superfast computers, Popular Science, 1984. https://books.google.com/books?id=eAAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66