Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

Re:Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors by kllrnohj on Thursday April 22, 2021 @05:08PM (#26908231)

It sounds like a lot but it almost isn't? Like this is ~50x bigger than an Nvidia A100, and the A100 pulls up to 400w. 50 * 400 ~= 20kW. So in terms of thermal density it's in-line with existing GPUs.

That said, I'd be fascinated to see the cooling solution. Is it just a massive copper heatsink & a boatload of airflow? Typical approaches of using heatpipes to expand the heatsink won't really work with something this big after all. Or is it a massive waterblock with multiple inlets/outlets so it can hit up a stack of radiators? How do they get even mounting pressure across that large of an area?

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Re:Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors by mvanaltvorst on Thursday April 22, 2021 @05:35PM (#26908474)

There's an image on their website[1], pretty huge water pumps.

"To solve the 70-year-old problem of wafer-scale, we needed not only to yield a big chip, but to invent new mechanisms for powering, packaging, and cooling it.

The traditional method of powering a chip from its edges creates too much dissipation at a large chip’s center. To prevent this, CS-2’s innovative design delivers power perpendicularly to each core.

To uniformly cool the entire wafer, pumps inside CS-2 move water across the back of the WSE-2, then into a heat exchanger where the internal water is cooled by either cold datacenter water or air."

[1]: https://cerebras.net/product/

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