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Comment by raghavtoshniwal | Hacker News Reader

Sooo, short Nvidia?

Depends if this results in more efficient models or simply larger, more capable models.

In both cases this is a prime opportunity for anyone to disrupt Nvidia. They are in this market position in large part because both video games and neural networks do a lot of highly parallel floating point math, especially matrix multiplication. This model architecture doesn't do any of that.

Of course it should be fairly simple for Nvidia to add special silicon and instructions for two-bit addition to a future generation of their cards. But it'll take a while because they already have a roadmap and preexisting commitments. And any competitor doesn't have to copy everything Nvidia does to make floating point numbers go fast, they can just focus on making two-bit data handling and addition go fast.

Yes, but with their current market cap, the more likely result is they acquire one of the several competitors poised to take advantage of this and throw massive resources behind them.

Hardly for this reason, but it does look suspiciously high doesn't it.

These still run on GPUs

- we have llama.cpp (could be enough or at least as mentioned in the paper a co-processor to accelerate the calc can be added, less need for large RAM / high end hardware)

- as most work is inference, might not need for as many GPUs

- consumer cards (24G) could possibly run the big models

If consumer cards can run the big models, then datacenter cards will be able to efficiently run the really big models.

Some tasks we are using LLMs for are performing very close to GPT-4 levels using 7B models, so really depends on what value you are looking to get.

GPU's aren't yet awfully efficient at 1 bit math.

I could imagine FPGA designs might be competitive.

And dedicated ASIC's would almost certainly beat both by a decent margin.

I'm very unconvinced that ASICs are better suited for this than for FP16/FP8 models that are being used today.

BF16 is a pretty big unit in an ASIC - You need at least 9 * 5 gates to calculate the exponent of the result, a 10 bit barrel shifter (10*10 + 10*ceil(log2(10)) gates), and a 10 bit multiplier (approximately 10 * 10 * 9 gates)

Total = 1085 gates. The reality is probably far more, because you're going to want to use carry-look-ahead and pipelining.

Whereas 1 bit multiplies and add's of say a 16 bit accumulator use... 16 gates! (and probably half since you can probably use scheduling tricks to skip past the zero's, at the expense of variable latency...)

So when 1 bit math uses only 1/100th of the silicon area of 16 bit math, and according to this paper gets the same results, the future is clearly silicon that can do 1 bit math.

I don't think it would be difficult to make them efficient.

The main reason why we run this stuff on GPUs is their memory bandwidth, anyway.

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