From a philosophical point of view, we think a frame shift is in order. A “register” certainly shouldn’t be a 32-bit word like on the CPUs of old. And a 1024-bit wide vector register, as CUDA uses, is certainly a step in the right direction. But to us a “register” is a 16x16 tile of data. We think AI wants this."
The hardware needs of AI are starting to focus. GPUs, after all, were designed for an entirely different job. They're used for AI because they have good matrix multiply hardware. "AI GPUs" get to leave out some of the stuff in a real GPU (does an H100 even have texture fill units?). Then there's a trend towards much shorter numbers. 16 bit floating point? 8 bit? 2 bit? 1 bit? That will settle out at some point. This paper indicates that hardware that likes 16x16 tiles makes a lot of sense. It's certainly possible to build such hardware. Someone reading this is probably writing it in VHDL right now, or will be soon.
Then we'll see somewhat simpler, less general, and cheaper devices that do "AI" operations with as little excess hardware baggage as possible. Nice.