So what you’re saying is that Cerebras chips offer 44GB of what is comparable to L1 caches, while NVidia is offering 80GB of what is comparable to “fast DRAM” ?

Sort of. But SRAM is not all made equal - L1 caches are small because they’re fast, and vice-versa L3 SRAM caches are slow because they’re big.

To address a large amount of SRAM requires an approximately log(N) amount of logic just to do the addressing (gross approximation). That extra logic takes time for a lookup operation to travel through, hence large = slow.

It’s also not one pool of SRAM. It’s thousands of small SRAM groups spread across the chip, with communication pathways in between.

So to have 44GB of SRAM is a very different architecture to 80GB of (unified) HBM (although even then that’s not true as most chips use multiple external memory interfaces).

HBM is high bandwidth. Whether that’s “fast” or not depends on the trade off between bandwidth and latency.

So, what I’m saying is this is way more complicated than it seems. But overall, yeah, Cerebras’ technical strategy is “big SRAM means more fast”, and they’ve not yet proven whether that’s technically true nor whether it makes economic sense.