Comment by numbers_guy
1 day ago
Nothing in principle. But Huang probably doesn't believe in hyper specializing their chips at this stage because it's unlikely that the compute demands of 2035 are something we can predict today. For a counterpoint, Jim Keller took Tenstorrent in the opposite direction. Their chips are also very efficient, but even more general purpose than NVIDIA chips.
How is Tenstorrent h/w more general purpose than NVIDIA chips? TT hardware is only good for matmuls and some elementwise operations, and plain sucks for anything else. Their software is abysmal.
Of course there's the general purpose RISC V CPU controller component but also, each NPU is designed in troikas that have one core reading data in, one core performing the actual kernel work, and the third core forwarding data out.