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by hyperopt
3687 days ago
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I listen to the Talking Machines as well. Great podcast. Another question would be are the gains worth the cost of an ML-specific ASIC. GPUs have the entire, massive gaming industry driving the cost down. I suppose that as adoption of gradient-descent-based neural networks increases, it may be worth the cost in a similar way that GPUs are worth the cost. Then again, I have never implemented SGD on a GPU so I'm not aware if there are any bottlenecks that could be solved with an ML-specific ASIC. Can anyone else shed some light on this? |
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Per-unit manufacturing cost scales logarithmically. Even a single batch of custom silicon on yesterday's technology is only $30K. This is one of the reasons there is so much interest in RISC-V; hardware costs are not the barrier-to-entry that they used to be.
So yeah, the gaming market pushes the per-unit price of GPUs down, but even an additional 2x reduction in rackspace and power will pay for itself at the right scale.