WSE (Wafer Scale Engine)

2019: Announcement

On August 19, 2019 Cerebras Systems provided as the company approves, the biggest processor in the world. It is also unique presence more than 1 trillion transistors.

The chip under the name Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) has the sizes of 215 x 215 mm, the area of 46,225 sq. mm, about 400 thousand computing cores and 18 Gbytes of the internal memory.

Comparison of the sizes of the WSE processor and baseball ball

On the dimensions WSE approximately in 57 times more the flagman video card Nvidia V100 in which "only" 21.1 billion transistors are provided.

Cerebras will sell processors as a part of the equipment for data centers which includes own water cooling system.

The CEO of a startup Andrew Feldman in a conversation with the Fortune edition reported that the computer system will be 150 times more powerful than the server with several graphic Nvidia accelerators. At this WSE will use only 2-3% of space and the electric power which are necessary for a server farm based on solutions of Nvidia with a comparable performance.

Such efficiency is reached at the expense of a form factor of WSE. In the traditional environment used for the implementation of artificial intelligence consisting of several separate graphic processors, the processed data should move constantly between different chips on rather slow network channels. It is not a problem for WSE because all calculations are executed on one payment.

The idea of centralization of computation processes on one big chip for increase in efficiency was tried to be implemented for decades. However any company to Cerebras could not bring it to commercial level because of big technical difficulties.

Interconnect between cores, memory and other WSE components will work with total capacity of 100 PBytes / page. Interconnect is implemented in the form of full-meshed topology (2D Mesh) and Swarm (swarm) is called that emphasizes the principle of work.^[1]

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