New analog chip capable of outperforming top-end GPUs by as much as 1000x

Faster than an H100 for solving 128x128 matrices. But it’s not clear to me how they tested this, code is only available on request.

> We have described a high-precision and scalable analogue matrix equation solver. The solver involves low-precision matrix operations, which are suited well to RRAM-based computing. The matrix operations were implemented with a foundry-developed 40-nm 1T1R RRAM array with 3-bit resolution. Bit-slicing was used to guarantee the high preci- sion. Scalability was addressed through the BlockAMC algorithm, which was experimentally demonstrated. A 16 × 16 matrix inversion problem was solved with the BlockAMC algorithm with 24-bit fixed-point preci- sion. The analogue solver was also applied to the detection process in massive MIMO systems and showed identical BER performance within only three iterative cycles compared with digital counterparts for 128 × 8 systems with 256-QAM modulation.

This looks like one of many ideas for more efficient compute chips for machine learning. I'm waiting for the day some chip gets mass produced and works at scale for some large model and with sufficient reliability, but until then, I don't think there's anything particularly newsworthy here. I do think it'll eventually happen at some point maybe within a decade, but surely some alternative computing paradigm to the GPU will succeed. The analog chip in the article only seems to be a research prototype for now.

Huge if true, room temperature semiconductor if false

Seems a bit too good to be true.

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What’s this good for?