California Start-Up Cerebras Has Developed World’s Biggest Chip For AI

California start-up Cerebras has developed the world’s biggest computer chip to be used to train AI systems. It is set to be revealed after being in development for four years. 

Contrary to the normal progression of chips getting smaller, the new one developed by Cerebras has a surface area bigger than an IPad. It is more than 80 times bigger than any competitors, and it uses a large amount of electricity. 

The new development represents the astounding amount of computing power that is being used in AI. Included in this is the $1bn investment from Microsoft into OpenAI that was announced last month. OpenAI is trying to develop an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which will be a giant leap forward, something that will change much of what we know. 

Cerebras is unique in this field because of the enormous size of their chip. Other companies endlessly work to create extremely small chips. Most of our advanced chips today are assembled like this. According to Patrick Moorhead, a US chip analyst, Cerebras basically put an entire computing cluster on a single chip. 

Cerebras is looking to join the likes of other companies like Intel, Habana, Labs, and the UK start-up Graphcore. They are all building a new generation of specialized AI chips. This development in AI chips is reaching its biggest stage yet as the companies are going to start delivering the first chips to customers by the end of the year. Among the companies, Cerebras will be looking to be the go-to for massive computing tasks that are being done by our largest internet companies. 

There are many more companies and start-ups involved in this space including Graphcore, Wave Computing, and the Chinese based start-up Cambricon. They are all looking to develop specialized AI chips used for inference. They want to take a trained AI system and use it in real-world scenarios. 

Normally, it takes a long time for the development process to finish and actual products be shipped to people and companies. According to Linley Group, a US chip research firm, there are a lot of technical issues that are time-consuming. Although it takes awhile for products to be developed, there is still a big interest in these companies. Cerebras has raised over $200m in venture capital. As of late last year, they were valued at about $1.6bn. There is a lot of projected growth for the global revenue of these deep learning chipsets. 

The reason that these companies are focusing on this type of processor for AI is because of the huge amounts of data that are needed in order to train neural networks. Those neural networks are then used in deep-learning systems and are responsible for things such as image recognition. 

The chip from Cerebras is a single chip made out of a 300mm diameter circular wafer. It is the largest silicon disc to be made in the current chip factories. The norm is for these wafers to be split up into many individual chips instead of one giant one. Anyone who tried before ran into issues with putting circuitry into something so big. Cerebras got past this by connecting the different sectors on the wafers. Once this is done, they are able to communicate with each other and become a big processor. 

Cerebras is looking forward and will try to link cores in a matrix pattern to be able to communicate with each other. They want to connect 400,000 cores while keeping all of the processing on one single chip. 

It will be exciting to see these developments move forward with Cerebras and other companies continuing to advance our AI systems.