Re: Great , even more technology for its own sake
> That's what you want. I want a car that can get me home from the pub, safely and legally.
Ahh, you aren't the guy I'm worried about.
I'm worried about the guy at the pub next to you that has less concern about safety and legality. I want him to have a self-driving car.
I do cringe a bit when I read stories such as this that say 'TeraFLOP' in the headline. I think about scientific computing, where 64 bit floating point is the standard. And this chip is far from a 'teraflop' by that metric.
But *in the context of this presentation*, it really is a teraflop. The presentation was mostly about what applications can use a chip like this. Those applications can (and do) effectively use FP16. How many bits per pixel does it take to recognize a speed limit sign? About a single bit, with a really big dynamic range. (Half joking here, but only half.)
Working in FP16 is a major advantage for a mobile chip. It's not so much that FP64 floating point units are larger or take more power. They do use a little more power and space, but only a little. The major issue is moving the data around, especially writing it to memory, take a lot of power and bandwidth -- far too much for a passive heatsink chip with only one or two memory devices.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
