Why Is Japan Still Investing in Custom Floating Point Accelerators?
21 comments
·September 5, 2025ghaff
It may also be worth noting that Japan has a pretty long history of marching to their own drummer in computing. They either created their own architectures or adopted others after pretty much everyone had moved on.
numpad0
It's unfortunate that they don't sell them on open markets. There are few of these accelerators that could threaten NVIDIA monopoly if prices(and manufacturing costs!) were right.
pclmulqdq
They do sell these on the open market. You just have to be in the market for an entire cluster. The minimum order quantity for Pezy is several racks.
WithinReason
The hardware is the easy part of accelerating NN training. Nvidia's software and infrastructure is so well designed and established that no competitor can threaten them even if they give away the hardware for free.
DrNosferatu
> if they give away the hardware for free.
Seriously doubt that: free hardware (or 10s of bucks) would galvanize the community and achieve huge support - look at the Raspberry Pi project original prices and the consequences.
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saagarjha
I don't know about well designed but it's definitely established.
CoastalCoder
Could you elaborate?
I've only done a little work on CUDA, but I was pretty impressed with it and with their NSys tools.
I'm curious what you wish was different.
WithinReason
Who has better software than Nvidia for NN training? Meaning the least amount of friction getting a new network to train.
KeplerBoy
It's not all about NNs and AI. Take a look at the Top500, a lot of people are doing classical HPC work on Nvidia GPUs, which are increasingly not designed for this. Unfortunately the HPC market is just a lot smaller than the AI bubble.
rwmj
If the hardware isn't available at all, we'll never find out if the software moat could be overcome.
kragen
Fascinating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_program,_multiple_dat... explains the relation to SIMT.
thiago_fm
Great article documenting PEZY. It's incredible how close they are from NVidia despite being a very small team.
To me, this looks like a win.
Governments are there to finance projects like this that enable the country to have certain skillsets that wouldn't exist otherwise because of other countries having better solutions in the global market.
eru
Governments are terrible at picking winners.
actionfromafar
Everyone is, and what survives, survives.
But what governments often can do, is break local optimums clustering around the quarter economy and take moonshot chances and find paths otherwise never taken. Hopefully one of these paths are great.
The difficult thing becomes deciding when to pull the plug. Is ITER a good thing or not? (Results wise, it is, but for the money? Who can tell really.)
sylware
Last time I heard about that it was for "super computers": nearly or even faster than the alternatives with a massive energy consumption advantage.
Pezy and the other Japanese native chips are first and foremost about HPC. The world may have picked up AI in the last 2 years, but the Japanese chipmakers are still thinking primarily about HPC, with AI as just one HPC workload.
These Pezy chips are also made for large clusters. There is a whole system design around the chips that wasn't presented here. The Pezy-SC2, for instance, was built around liquid immersion cooling. I am not sure you could ever buy an air-cooled version.