Cerebras teases world’s largest chip

2.6 trillion 7nm transistors and 850,000 cores.

The original Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) is a marvel in truly every sense, but the company has now upped the ante. The original WSE brought an unbelievable 400,000 cores, 1.2 trillion 16nm transistors, 46,225 square millimetres of silicon, and 18 GB of on-chip memory, all in one chip that is as large as an entire wafer.

How do you top that? According to the Cerebras slide deck it shared at Hot Chips 2020, you transition to TSMC’s 7nm process, which allows a mind-bending 850,000 cores powered by 2.6 trillion processors – all in a single chip that’s the size of an entire wafer. The company says it already has the massive chips up and running in its labs.

The current Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) sidesteps the reticle limitations of modern chip manufacturing, which limit the size of a single monolithic processor die, to create the wafer-sized processor. The company accomplishes this feat by stitching together the dies on the wafer with a communication fabric, thus allowing it to work as one large cohesive unit.

The end result is 55.9 times larger than the world’s largest GPU (the new Nvidia A100 measures 826mm2 with 54.2 billion transistors).