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I had bet that matmult would be in transformer-optimized hardware costing a fraction of GPUs first class in torch 2 years ago with no reason to use GPUs any more. Wrong.

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> matmult would be in transformer-optimized hardware

It is... it's in GPUs lol

> first class in torch

It is

> costing a fraction of GPUs

Why would anyone give you this for cheaper than GPUs lol?

I think they’re referring to hardware like TPUs and other ASICs. Which also exist, of course :)

Sure but GPUs literally have MMA engines now

The real bottleneck is the memory, optimize your matmul architecture all you like whilst you still have it connected to a big chunk of HBM memory (or whatever your chosen high bandwidth memory is) you can only do so much.

So really GPU v not GPU (e.g. TPU) doesn't matter a whole lot if you've got fundamentally the same memory architecture.

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