upvote
Yeah Im surprised nobody is talking about this. When everyone first saw Taalas I looked at the design and it had a big legup in physical cache availale compared to most chips. Makes you wonder how much of a benefit there is to the actual "baking" of the model vs just having a large chip with a ton of SRAM (or whatever) soldered close to the edge physically.

I feel like what we really need is the ability to solder computer cache on all sides of the chip Meaning above and below as well. If you can only attach it to the edges you will be inherently physically limited on the amount you can put (and maybe even have latency benefits as well)

reply
What you're describing is what Cerberas does.

Talaas is different, it's a true compute-in-memory architecture where the weights are stored in the connections between the transistors that perform the matrix multiply, rather than in seperate memory cells.

Most of the benefit comes from this architecture; hardwiring the weights into the silicon is just the easiest way to implement it. SRAM requires too many transistors, DRAM requires an incompatible manufacturing process, and exotic phase-change memories aren't readily available.

reply
Cerebras chips are massive and do have more on the edge but they dont have any top or bottom cache do they?
reply
They can't due to power density, I believe - they have to be run in a sandwiched waterblock with massive cooling, as far as I can tell. That's the biggest thing that baked weights gets you - a relatively modest watts-per-square-mm compare to cerebras, where they had to engineer a whole system to get the watts out of the chip
reply
Do you think there's room for reducing power requirements? Obviously shrinking the process is a win, but is the existing implementation a "just make it work" phase that has opportunities to increase computational efficiency?

With that kind of speed and if even lower power requirements, they could release mini compute units with USB4/Thunderbolt for plug and play inference.

reply
I mean I think I read their spec sheet that it was 2.5kw on the asic but closer to 25kw with GPUs, for the same number of tokens (different latencies of course), but there's no way that a dedicated from-scratch matmul+memory chip can be less efficient than a GPU.
reply
Taalas does not have cache so...

I agree that Groq with multilayer hybrid bonding could be a good idea.

reply
Well, technically it is their hardware now...
reply
And their team, if they treat them well.
reply
1. How come you didn't make your implementation public? You could be a millionaire now. 2. Especially if AMD has the technology to do what Taalas does, it makes a ton of sense for AMD to acquire Taalas: remove them from the market. Make sure nobody else (Intel, Huawei, Alibaba, NVIDIA, etc) acquires them. It could have been a great acquisition for a rebirth of BlackBerry btw.
reply