lwneal

Joined 6 years ago

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https://lwneal.com
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Comment · 3 years ago
A man goes to prison, and the first night while he's laying in bed, he hears someone yell out, "44!", followed by laughter from the other prisoners.

Puzzled, he laid back down, but then he heard someone else yell out, "72!", followed by even more laughter.

"What's going on?" he asked his cellmate.

"Well, we've all heard every joke so many times, we've given them each a number to make it easier."

"Oh," he says, "can I try?"

"Sure, go ahead."

So, he yells out "102!" and the place goes nuts. People are whooping and laughing in a hysteria. He looks at his cellmate rolling on the ground laughing.

"Wow, good joke, huh?"

"Yeah! We ain't never heard that one before!"

Comment · 3 years ago
An H100 uses up to 350 Watts, while an A16 has a TDP of only 8 W. But, the A16 is a smaller chip (about 108mm vs. the H100's 814mm) so you can fit more of them on a wafer. Since a wafer is 300mm in diameter, its area is 70685 mm^2, which would yield 86 H100's or 654 A16's. [1][2]

However, that discounts the waste on the edges of the circular wafer, as well as the chip yield, which will both likely be worse for the larger chip [3]. But, assuming a generous 70% yield by area [4], one wafer's worth of H100s all packaged into GPUs and running full blast will use maybe 20 kilowatts, while the same wafer of A16s might use 3.6 kilowatts. Although in practice, the A16s will spend most of their time conserving battery power in your pocket, and even the H100s will spend some of their time idle.

TSMC is now producing over 14 million wafers per year. At most 1.2 million of those are on the 3nm node, and not all of that production goes to GPUs. But as an upper bound, if we imagine that all of TSMC's wafers could be filled up with nothing but H100 chips, and if all of those H100 chips were immediately put to use running AI 24/7, how much additional load could it put on the power grid every year?

The answer is, around 280 gigawatts, or if they were running 24/7 for a year, about 2500 terawatt-hours. That's about 10% of current world electricity consumption! So it's not completely implausible to imagine that a huge ramp-up in AI usage might have an effect on the electric grid.

*edit: This assumes we're talking about the Apple A16 (ie. the difference between phone chips and GPU chips). If we're talking about the Nvidia A16 (ie. the difference between current GPU chips and last node's GPU chips) see pclmulqdq's comment. ⠀

[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/soc/apple-a16-bionic

[2] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/h100-pcie-80-gb.c3899

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185108

[4] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/analyst-tsmc-hitting-5...

[5] https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/manufacturing/...

[6] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2814+million%29+*+%282...*

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
The message in the screenshot says "HKEY LOCAL MACHINE", but shouldn't it be "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE", with underscores?

Maybe it's just a typo by the Nvidia engineer who wrote it, but why would they even write a notice like this? The language is a bit threatening, and doesn't seem to serve any legal purpose like a disclaimer or EULA. And why would they print it in red?

This looks like it might be a joke or a hoax. Maybe it's meant to draw attention to the near-monopoly that Nvidia holds over chips capable of running generative AI.

Comment · 3 years ago
The most incredible thing about this system is that it uses Stable Diffusion (the open source AI art generator), rather than DALL-E (the proprietary closed art generator owned by OpenAI).

The fact that even Microsoft, which partially owns OpenAI, is giving up on DALL-E shows the power of building an open-source community around models with published, downloadable weights.

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