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by MBCook 771 days ago
It needs 18,000 amps per wafer and puts off 15 KW of heat?

This feels a little like a “you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could” thing.

Wow.

I can’t imagine how much one of those wafers must cost. I’d love to know.

Hope it accomplishes what they want because they’ve certainly had to spend a fortune to get to this point.

3 comments

We don’t know if this wafer is a good investment or not. It really depends on what its performance and cost are compared to the performance and cost of other solutions.

My guess is if they did this, they thought it would be a huge improvement over buying off the self hardware. The reason I say this is it’s expensive to design a wafer computer, and get it manufactured.

18000 amps? What kind of a motherboard and power delivery is that
The chip operates without a traditional motherboard, and it’s basically permanently and directly attached to power delivery and a massive heatsink. It’s a very ambitious design, I never thought we’d see it so soon. Technical overview for this reads like porn for HW engineers
This. Gene Amdahl himself (of Amdahl’s law fame) gave up on wafer scale, proclaiming it to be 100 years too soon. Now it’s looking like it was only 40-50!
A comparable product from Cerebras is rumored to cost around $2-3M.