21.5cms squared
A chip so big you could eat your, er, chips off it
Size of the world’s largest PC processor (above)
What is it?
The world’s largest PC processor, and the first to contain over a trillion transistors.
That’s a lot, isn’t it?
Yes, an awful lot - 1.2 trillion to be precise. Intel’s first 4004 processor (pictured below), released in 1971, had just 2,300 transistors. By 2002, its Itanium chips were considered insanely powerful with 221 million transistors. Seventeen years on, and the Wafer-scale Engine has over 5,000 times this number. As you’d expect, this means it has to be much bigger than the average processor, which you can easily hold between your finger and thumb.
So how big is it?
Slightly bigger than a standard ipad, at 21.5cms squared (3.3in squared). The company that made it, Cerebras, is American, so has represented the processor’s size by photographing it next to a baseball (pictured). A cricket ball would’ve done the job just as nicely.
But I thought processors were always meant to get smaller?
Mostly that’s true. Dozens are made on a single silicon ‘wafer’, which is cut apart to separate them. Being so petite means they can work fast without getting too hot, but it does limit how many cores they have. The processor in your PC will have up to eight cores, slightly fewer than the Wafer-scale Engine’s 400,000, all linked by high- bandwidth connections.
Why does it need so many cores?
To perform complex artificial intelligence (AI) tasks in many areas of modern technology, from driverless cars to facialrecognition software. At the moment, AI systems are powered by GPUS (graphics processing units), which have more cores than processors do. These are more suitable for AI systems that need to be broken down into smaller tasks and run simultaneously, learning how to become more efficient without human help. This is called ‘deep learning’.
The mightiest GPUS, with 5,000 cores and 21.1 billion transistors, can power speech recognition, image processing and pattern matching. Cerebras boasts that the Wafer-scale Engine will carry out such tasks at “previously impossible” speeds, cutting the time from months to minutes.
The processor in your PC will have up to eight cores, slightly fewer than the Wafer-scale Engine’s 400,000
How does it avoid getting too hot?
This is one of the “decades-old” problems Cerebras claims to have solved. Instead of using a heat sink and fans like PCS, the Wafer-scale Engine is cooled by vertical water pipes built into a “cold plate” attached above it. Cerebras is proud of this ingenuity, saying that the world has been waiting for a processor that can fulfill the potential of AI. Some experts are less than convinced though.
Why?
They think the processor’s complexity will limit its appeal, though have conceded that some companies with money to burn will pay to use it. Firms will pay big bucks for technology that helps them to analyse data faster.
Do we know who’s using it yet?
No, that’s being kept secret, though Cerebras’s founder and boss Andrew Feldman says a “handful” of companies are testing its ability to enhance certain tasks, including designing drugs.
So it won’t be appearing in home PCS?
No. They’d need to be 50 times bigger, and receive water piped directly from Victoria Falls. But you’re bound to feel the benefit at some point in the future, when the technology trickles down from Silicon Valley’s mega companies into the average home. At the moment, though, not everyone is ready for a processor big enough to use as a door stopper.