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I used to work for Graphcore.

I used to work for Graphcore. Microsoft gave up on Graphcore fairly early on actually and I think it was a wise decision. There were a number of issues with Graphcore's GC1 and GC2 chips: * a bet on storing the entire model (and code) in 900MB of SRAM. Hell of a lot of SRAM but it only really works for small models and the world wants enormous models. * Blew it's weirdness budget by a lot. Everything is quite different so it's a significant effort to port software to it. Often you did get a decent speedup (like 2-10x) but I doubt many people thought that was worth the software pain. * The price was POA so normal people couldn't buy one. (And it would have been too expensive for individuals anyway.) So there was little grass roots community support and research. Nvidia gets that because it's very easy to buy a consumer 4090 or whatever and run AI on it. * Nvidia were killing it with Grace Hopper. GC3 was way more ambitious and supports a mountain of DRAM with crazy memory bandwidth so if they ever finish it maybe they'll make a comeback.

Posted by IshKebab on Oct 4, 2025, 7:09 AM

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I used to work for Graphcore.

IshKebabOct 4, 2025, 7:09 AM

I used to work for Graphcore. Microsoft gave up on Graphcore fairly early on actually and I think it was a wise decision. There were a number of issues with Graphcore's GC1 and GC2 chips: * a bet on storing the entire model (and code) in 900MB of SRAM. Hell of a lot of SRAM but it only really works for small models and the world wants enormous models. * Blew it's weirdness budget by a lot. Everything is quite different so it's a significant effort to port software to it. Often you did get a decent speedup (like 2-10x) but I doubt many people thought that was worth the software pain. * The price was POA so normal people couldn't buy one. (And it would have been too expensive for individuals anyway.) So there was little grass roots community support and research. Nvidia gets that because it's very easy to buy a consumer 4090 or whatever and run AI on it. * Nvidia were killing it with Grace Hopper. GC3 was way more ambitious and supports a mountain of DRAM with crazy memory bandwidth so if they ever finish it maybe they'll make a comeback.

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