The five technical challenges Cerebras overcame in building the first trillion-transistor chip – TechCrunch

Superlatives abound at Cerebras, the until-today stealthy next-generation silicon chip company looking to make training a deep learning model as quick as buying toothpaste from Amazon. Launching after almost three years of quiet development, Cerebras introduced its new chip today -- and it is a doozy. The "Wafer Scale Engine" is 1.2 trillion transistors (the most ever), 46,225 square millimeters (the largest ever), and includes 18 gigabytes of on-chip memory (the most of any chip on the market today) and 400,000 processing cores (guess the superlative). Cerebras' Wafer Scale Engine is larger than a typical Mac keyboard (via Cerebras Systems). It's made a big splash here at Stanford University at the Hot Chips conference, one of the silicon industry's big confabs for product introductions and roadmaps, with various levels of oohs and aahs among attendees.