![]() ![]() Their unique genius was in providing a state-of-the-art ecosystem for the WSE to live in-one which supplied it with power, cooling, and communications. What’s clever about the WSE is that its design and manufacturing largely follow existing industry processes and methods. There are more transistors-by far-in this one Cerebras chip than in all 100,000 computing objects combined in the Museum’s permanent collection.įigure 2. (Figure 2.) The size of a transistor in the WSE is 7 nanometers. How far could things be pushed? The answer is astounding: on a huge, single square piece of silicon, about 8.5” on a side, the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) has 2.6 trillion transistors, which make up 850,000 AI-optimized processing units. For Cray, who always pushed the limits of the possible, keeping the system from burning up was just as important as designing fast circuits.Ĭerebras, a well-funded Silicon Valley startup, has developed one of the most ingenious and technically elegant solutions to the problem of both "cramming" (to paraphrase Gordon Moore) more transistors onto a chip while keeping it cool. We can see this limitation echoed this in the observation that several of legendary supercomputer designer Seymour Cray’s patents were related to ways of keeping his world-beating computer systems cool. The World’s Biggest ChipĬomputer designer Gordon Bell once noted that getting the highest speed possible in computers-which rely entirely on ICs-is often about "plumbing and packaging." Since integrated circuits get hotter the faster they run, fast computers have to worry about keeping their chips cool. ![]() Special chemicals are applied before and after to allow this and the process is repeated until a sandwich, made up of many layers, has been built up and the IC is finished and ready for packaging. Light (often ultraviolet) is blasted through a stencil with the patterns IC designers want burned into the chip. The basic process that has allowed this is photolithography, which, if you break it down into its Greek origins means “writing on stone with light.” Figure 1 below shows the general idea. It took a long time to get there, but the progress was steady: since Fairchild Semiconductor chemical engineer Gordon Moore first wrote about ICs in 1965, roughly every 18–24 months the number of transistors on an integrated circuit has doubled. Sixty years later, the hot consumer product is a voice activated smartphone connected to the "world brain" of the internet-science fiction only a generation ago. In the early days of ICs, for example, one of the earliest products was the basic four-function 1973 Sears/Bowmar handheld calculator. You could see this change in spacecraft, aviation, communications, and, most obviously for most of us, in the consumer products of their times. Since Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby’s coinvention of the IC in 1958-59, relentless improvements in transistor density have taken place. The IC itself is a silicon sandwich made up of many transistors (little switches) wired together into electrical circuits. The silicon chip, or integrated circuit (IC), is one of humankind’s most magnificent, complex, and transformative creations. ![]()
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