Quantum #113
Issue #113 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. More silicon diversity this week from AMD, Nvidia, Ali Baba in the form of GPUs and CPUs. HPC Club gets a date and we’re still hiring.
It seems to be mostly silicon related news from last week and we’ll kick off with a continuation of the topic of accelerator diversity that the Cerberas IPO from the last issue mentioned. We see this gaining further momentum as Google partners with Blackrock to deliver more TPUs and Ali Baba drops their new AI focused accelerator too.
All of that is well and good, but I still don’t understand what the end game is here, what’s the plan to get anyone to write their code to target your silicon? Or are we really planning to go old school and just target a single platform?
Continuing the silicon theme but in CPU form, we get some news on AMDs “Venice” processors with a touted 70% uplift in performance. We saw close to that in our own testing between Genoa and Turin so whilst a bold claim it may be credible. Meanwhile, Nvidia has decided it is a CPU manufacturer too and is targeting 200 billion in sales of its Vera CPUs. As a reminder these of the ARM flavour, meaning that adoption may be less than trivial for some use cases (I’m looking at you old quant libraries and obscure scientific libraries).
Lastly, in news from us at HMx Labs we’ve finally set a date for the next HPC Club. July 8th. Mark your calendars get your night out passes now, I promise it will be worth it! We’re also still hiring so if you know a good HPC Nerd or two please point them my way especially if they’re any good at writing code or marketing/ business development.
In The News
Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.
Accelerator silicon diversity seems to be continuing unabated
But we still need CPUs
Luke James
From HMx Labs
