Actual result: "This new process promises to increase the number of optical fibers that can be connected at the edge of a chip, a measure known as beachfront density, by six times."

Faster interconnects are always nice, but this is more like routine improvement.

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bahmboo 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"In recent inference tests run on a 3-billion-parameter LLM developed from IBM’s Granite-8B-Code-Base model, NorthPole was 47 times faster than the next most energy-efficient GPU and was 73 times more energy efficient than the next lowest latency GPU."

It's also fascinating that they are experimenting with analog memory because it pairs so well with model weights

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anyfoo 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, analog memory fits so incredibly well. Who cares if it's not "exact" and fuzzes around a bit if it's only used for weights and has massive efficiency advantages. Weights are never "exact" themselves, and it doesn't matter if they don't always read exactly the same. You basically just get some extra "temperature" for free!

A bit beautiful that we might end up partially going back to analog computers, which were quickly replaced by digital ones.

	▲	magicalhippo 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> A bit beautiful that we might end up partially going back to analog computers, which were quickly replaced by digital ones. How long till we get a Ben Eater-style video about someone making a basic analog neural network using some DACs, analog multipliers[1] and bucket-brigade chips[2] for intermediate values? [1]: https://www.analog.com/media/en/training-seminars/tutorials/... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket-brigade_device

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imtringued 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Their NorthPole chip doesn't look much different than the Groq LPU or Tenstorrent's hardware or even just AMD's NPU design. The tenstorrent cards have a pretty big amount of SRAM considering their price.

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UltraSane 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In-Memory compute has nothing to do with connecting optical fibers to a chip.