“That said, we believe the real contest is not at the chip level. The challenge is scaling out compute accelerators to exascale proportions. Nvidia is taking its first steps with NVLink and pursuing greater accelerator independence from the processor. Nvidia is growing its software infrastructure and workload base up from single GPUs to clusters of GPUs.”
“Google chose to scale out its original TPU as a coprocessor directly linked to a processor. The TPU2 can also scale out as a direct 2:1 accelerator for processors. However, the TPU2 hyper-mesh programming model doesn’t appear to have a workload that can scale well. Yet. Google is looking for third-party help to find workloads that scale with TPU2 architecture.”
对于Data center的training和inference系统来说,竞争已经不是在单一芯片的层面了,而是看能否扩展到exascale的问题(exaFLOPS,10的18次方)。而和TPU2的同时发布TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC),对于发展TPU2的应用和生态,才是更为关键的动作。大家可以顺便看看这次Google展示的板级和机架的照片。
对于一个AI芯片项目来说,考虑整个软硬件生态,要比底层硬件架构的设计重要的多。最终给用户提供一个好用的解决方案,才是王道。
而对于看热闹的我们,也许站的远一点,可以看到更多有价值的东西,争论也才更有意义。
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