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by capableweb 1607 days ago
Good luck building special GPUs in just two years, especially with what's happening regarding chip production right now. Not sure how they could have achieved a project of this size/scope unless they use off-the-shelf components, since the backlogs are so long and have been for some time now.
1 comments

Facebook has been hiring FPGA engineers with ML experience since 2018 so I don't think this would be out of the question! But even so, Nvidia sell custom GPUs that aren't the same ones for gaming.
They claim the work was done in just two years ("The supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster, was the result of nearly two years of work"). I'm not a expert in manufacturing, but I'd imagine it takes longer than two years to design > test > manufacture completely new chips.

> But even so, Nvidia sell custom GPUs that aren't the same ones for gaming.

Interesting. Gonna be fun to observe the outrage (from distance) about how GPUs are not only used to destroy the environment for cryptocurrency profits, but now Facebook will also contribute to the world destruction for ad-money.