I can't access the page directly, because my browser doesn't leak enough identifying information to convince Reuters I'm not a bot, but an actual bot is perfectly capable of accessing the page.
Even if the hardware is really good, the software should be even better if they want to succeed.
Support for operating systems, compilers, programming languages, etc.
This is why a Raspberry Pi is still so popular even though there are a lot of cheaper alternatives with theoretically better performance. The software support is often just not as good.
The implication wasn't to use the raspberry pi toolchain. Just that toolchain are required and are a critical part of developing for new hardware. The Intel/AMD toolchain they will be competing with is even more mature than rpi. And toolchain availability and ease of use makes a huge difference whether you are developing for supercomputers or embedded systems. From the article:
"It uses technology called RISC-V, an open computing standard that competes with Arm Ltd and is increasingly being used by chip giants such as Nvidia and Broadcom."
So the fact that rpi tooling is better than the imitators and it has maintained a significant market share lead is relevant. Market share isn't just about performance and price. It's also about ease of use and popularity.
I spent a lot of time on systolic arrays to compute crypto currency POW (Blake 2 specifically). It’s an interesting problem and I learned a lot but made no progress. I’ve often wondered if anyone has done the same?
If there really is enough market demand for this kind of processor, it seems like someone like NEC who still makes vector processors would be better poised than a startup rolling RISC-V
So, a Systolic Array[1] spiced up with a pinch of control flow and a side of compiler cleverness? At least that's the impression I get from the servethehome article linked upthead. I wasn't able to find non-marketing better-than-sliced-bread technical details from 3 minutes of poking at your website.
My understanding is no, if I understand what people mean by systolic arrays.
GreenArray processors are complete computers with their own memory and running their own software. The GA144 chip has 144 independently programmable computers with 64 words of memory each. You program each of them, including external I/O and routing between them, and then you run the chip as a cluster of computers.
Text on the front page of the NS website* leads me to think you have a fancy compiler: "Intelligent software-defined hardware acceleration". Sounds like Cerebras to my non-expert ears.
NEC doesn't really make vector processors anymore. My company installed a new supercomputer built by NEC, and the hardware itself is actually Gigabyte servers running AMD Instinct MI300A, with NEC providing the installation, support, and other services.
The other company I can think of focusing on F64 is Fujitsu with its A64FX processor. This is an ARM64 with really meaty SIMD to get 3TFLOP of FP64.
I guess it it hard to compare chip for chip but the question is, if you are building a supercomputer (and we ignore pressure to buy sovereign) then which is better bang for the buck on representative workloads?
In a way, this is not new, it’s pretty much what annapurna did: they took ARM and got serious with it, creating the first high performance arm cpus. Then they got acqui-hired by amazon and the rest is history ;)
Servethehome[1] does a bit of a better job describing what maverick-2 is and why it makes sense.
[1]https://www.servethehome.com/nextsilicon-maverick-2-brings-d...
https://archive.is/6j2p4
I can't access the page directly, because my browser doesn't leak enough identifying information to convince Reuters I'm not a bot, but an actual bot is perfectly capable of accessing the page.
Same but I can’t access archive.is either because of the VPN
Odd that doesn't load for me but https://archive.ph/6j2p4 does
Archive.is is broken if you use cloudflare dns.
Even if the hardware is really good, the software should be even better if they want to succeed.
Support for operating systems, compilers, programming languages, etc.
This is why a Raspberry Pi is still so popular even though there are a lot of cheaper alternatives with theoretically better performance. The software support is often just not as good.
Their customers are building supercomputers?
The implication wasn't to use the raspberry pi toolchain. Just that toolchain are required and are a critical part of developing for new hardware. The Intel/AMD toolchain they will be competing with is even more mature than rpi. And toolchain availability and ease of use makes a huge difference whether you are developing for supercomputers or embedded systems. From the article:
"It uses technology called RISC-V, an open computing standard that competes with Arm Ltd and is increasingly being used by chip giants such as Nvidia and Broadcom."
So the fact that rpi tooling is better than the imitators and it has maintained a significant market share lead is relevant. Market share isn't just about performance and price. It's also about ease of use and popularity.
Curious if the architecture is similar to what is called “systolic” as in the Anton series of supercomputers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)
I spent a lot of time on systolic arrays to compute crypto currency POW (Blake 2 specifically). It’s an interesting problem and I learned a lot but made no progress. I’ve often wondered if anyone has done the same?
I find it helpful to read a saxpy and GEMM kernel for a new accelerator like this - do they have an example?
If there really is enough market demand for this kind of processor, it seems like someone like NEC who still makes vector processors would be better poised than a startup rolling RISC-V
I work in NS. The riscv was the "one more thing" aspect of the "reveal".
The main product/architecture discussed has nothing to do with vector processors or riscv.
It's a new, fundamentally different data-flow processor.
Hopefully we will improve in explaining what we do and why people may want to care.
So, a Systolic Array[1] spiced up with a pinch of control flow and a side of compiler cleverness? At least that's the impression I get from the servethehome article linked upthead. I wasn't able to find non-marketing better-than-sliced-bread technical details from 3 minutes of poking at your website.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array
Are the GreenArray chips also systolic arrays?
My understanding is no, if I understand what people mean by systolic arrays.
GreenArray processors are complete computers with their own memory and running their own software. The GA144 chip has 144 independently programmable computers with 64 words of memory each. You program each of them, including external I/O and routing between them, and then you run the chip as a cluster of computers.
[1] https://greenarraychips.com
Text on the front page of the NS website* leads me to think you have a fancy compiler: "Intelligent software-defined hardware acceleration". Sounds like Cerebras to my non-expert ears.
* https://www.nextsilicon.com
NEC doesn't really make vector processors anymore. My company installed a new supercomputer built by NEC, and the hardware itself is actually Gigabyte servers running AMD Instinct MI300A, with NEC providing the installation, support, and other services.
https://www.nec.com/en/press/202411/global_20241113_02.html
The other company I can think of focusing on F64 is Fujitsu with its A64FX processor. This is an ARM64 with really meaty SIMD to get 3TFLOP of FP64.
I guess it it hard to compare chip for chip but the question is, if you are building a supercomputer (and we ignore pressure to buy sovereign) then which is better bang for the buck on representative workloads?
I definitely expect this to be a big hit.
In a way, this is not new, it’s pretty much what annapurna did: they took ARM and got serious with it, creating the first high performance arm cpus. Then they got acqui-hired by amazon and the rest is history ;)
Sounds like an idea that would really benefit from a JIT-like approach to basically every software.
I don’t want my electronics to contribute to genocide and apartheid and possibly the next pager exploding terror attack. No thanks.