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Comment by green-eclipse | Hacker News Reader

The Cerebras chip really stands out in terms of the chip industry's relationship to Moore's law. Look at the graphs in this article for reference:

https://medium.com/predict/cerebras-trounces-moores-law-with...

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That article is hogwash. Sure, the Cerebras "chip" is impressive. But the idea that it will accelerate Moore's law and usher in the singularity is just nonsense. Nobody has even made serious efforts to use deep learning for physical design, and its scope for improving designs is limited at best even in theory.

If this was trying to aim at solid state physics and materials research, then maybe one could be carefully optimistic about a genuine breakthrough via something like room temperature, standard pressure super-conducting. As it stands, I call blind hype.

Agreed. One of the things that fascinates me about technology is how the new thing is always treated as magic. I'm hoping we're almost out of that phase for ML, as the hype is exhausting.

And for the curious, a good example of this is radium. For a while it was a miracle cure-all, put in everything from lipstick to jock straps. That did not work out well: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/03/how-we-re...

> Nobody has even made serious efforts to use deep learning for physical design

DeepMind have for place&route IIRC.

Yah, it's BS. But it may be teaching TSMC a whole lot about making larger chips with good yield, and the across-reticle interconnect technology is impressive too and may find some general applicability (e.g. it sounds like something AMD might like).

Oh, for sure there are things to be learned from this. The responsibility for yield doesn't lie with TSMC though, but with the logic design: to make this kind of integration work, your design has to be able to tolerate a fault essentially anywhere on the wafer surface.

This isn't magic, of course: keep in mind that we already have SRAM with extra capacity for fault tolerance, and multi-core chips which are binned based on the number of functioning cores has been standard for a long time.

Design to tolerate failures is only one variable in yields. Wafer-scale integration exercises to the limit both our ability to tolerate defects and our ability to minimize them.

That article is utter balderdash. Yes, it's obvious that you can fit more transistors on a "chip" if you make the chip be much, much larger than what we ordinarily think of as a chip. No, it does not mean that Moore's Law has been invalidated or some new "AI Moore’s Law" (quoting from the post) has come into being.

> Yes, it's obvious that you can fit more transistors on a "chip" if you make the chip be much, much larger than what we ordinarily think of as a chip.

Without defending the article, it is however the case that simply scaling a chip size has nontrivial problems. For example, Will the piece of silicon warp or shatter if one side happens to get hotter than the other?

Possibly. Wafer scale integration has been investigated before though and there were even a couple of attempts at commercial products; it's not a brand new technology. Nevertheless, it might be interesting to examine Cerebras' patents to see if anything of significance relating to WSI is there.

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