Humongous CPUs

23529-2930-26224-1-cerebus.jpg


Cerebus?
 
I wonder if chips like this could play games like supreme commander or maybe help with the AI in MOBAS like Core ( Which uses Epics paragon moba, and wants to be a kinda Paragon 2).
 
We've had some companies over the years come up with ideas for wafer sized chips. There are too many practicality issues. Fab's don't put out wafers with 100% yield, at least not on anything more complex that catalog parts. You have 1 wafer = 1 product. It means any little thing goes wrong and the whole wafer is scrapped. You don't put 1.2 trillion transistors on a chip and not have some problems. That's just the transistors by the way...you have to have capacitors, diodes, resistors and all those other things that make a circuit.

The article even says as much.
Also, fabricating such an enormous chip without any manufacturing defects is simply impossible, Cerebras admits—every chipmaker suffers manufacturing defects, and a certain number of “bad” chips on every wafer are simply discarded. In the case of Cerebras, the company designs in redundant processing cores, anticipating that defects will render some of them unusable. (How many, though, the company hasn’t said. In total, there are over 400,000 cores.) An I/O fabric connecting one core to the next can route around any defective cores.
Click to expand...
 
The way I see it, jokes aside, is that for those very specific loads in which you would try and use a server bank with GPUs you may instead use a wafer sized chip, even with a 17% or so of defective cores (which is quite a high number for a matured process as is 16nm), such a solution may actually be viable, specially with the way it should significantly diminish latency with everything on the same package and also the effective bandwidth, so yes it will be very situational but it wouldn't surprise me if the Chinese government has already put in an initial order to test out their potential in their social score big brother data centers.

At this point in time I don't feel like a tinfoil hat comment would be relevant, seeing as they do have that social score system up and running, this would just be a "refinement test".
 
Need a few of those folding for [H] right meow!

Interested to see how many cores it has and what the clock speed is. If all of those blocks are quad-cores on it at least, then that would put it at 336 cores or 672 cores if they're octo-cores!
 
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