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A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

A CPU that runs entirely on GPU

cypres

Comments (42)

  • jagged-chisel
    “A CPU that runs entirely on the GPU”I imagine a carefully crafted set of programming primitives used to build up the abstraction of a CPU…“Every ALU operation is a trained neural network.”Oh… oh. Fun. Just not the type of “interesting” I was hoping for.
  • bmc7505
  • bob1029
    A fun experiment but I wonder how many out there seriously think we could ever completely rid ourselves of the CPU. It seems to be a rising sentiment.The cost of communicating information through space is dealt with in fundamentally different ways here. On the CPU it is addressed directly. The actual latency is minimized as much as possible, usually by predicting the future in various ways and keeping the spatial extent of each device (core complex) as small as possible. The GPU hides latency with massive parallelism. That's why we can put them across relatively slow networks and still see excellent performance.Latency hiding cannot deal well in workloads that are branchy and serialized because you can only have one logical thread throughout. The CPU dominates this area because it doesn't cheat. It directly targets the objective. Making efficient, accurate control flow decisions tends to be more valuable than being able to process data in large volumes. It just happens that there are a few exceptions to this rule that are incredibly popular.
  • nomercy400
    I was taught years ago that MUL and ADD can be implemented in one or a few cycles. They can be the same complexity. What am I missing here?Also, is it possible to use the GPU's ADD/MUL implementation? It is what a GPU does best.
  • deep1283
    This is a fun idea. What surprised me is the inversion where MUL ends up faster than ADD because the neural LUT removes sequential dependency while the adder still needs prefix stages.
  • andrewdb
    Why do we call them GPUs these days?Most GPUs, sitting in racks in datacenters, aren't "processing graphics" anyhow.
  • throawayonthe
    very tangentially related is whatever vectorware et al are doing: https://www.vectorware.com/blog/
  • lorenzohess
    Out of curiosity, how much slower is this than an actual CPU?
  • artemonster
    Every clueless person who suggest that we move to GPUs entirely have zero idea how things work and basically are suggesting using lambos to plow fields and tractors to race in nascar
  • sudo_cowsay
    "Multiplication is 12x faster than addition..."Wow. That's cool but what happens to the regular CPU?
  • RagnarD
    Being able to perform precise math in an LLM is important, glad to see this.
  • nicman23
    can i run linux on a nvidia card though?
  • anon
    undefined
  • anon
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  • mrlonglong
    Now I've seen it all. Time to die.. (meant humourously)
  • Surac
    Well GPU are just special purpous CPU.
  • MadnessASAP
    Ya know just today I was thinking around a way to compile a neural network down to assembly. Matching and replacing neural network structures with their closest machine code equivalent.This is way cooler though! Instead of efficiently running a neural network on a CPU, I can inefficiently run my CPU on neural network! With the work being done to make more powerful GPUs and ASICs I bet in a few years I'll be able to run a 486 at 100MHz(!!) with power consumption just under a megawatt! The mind boggles at the sort of computations this will unlock!Few more years and I'll even be able to realise the dream of self-hosting ChatGPT on my own neural network simulated CPU!