Cerebras, a Silicon Valley company, has unveiled a new supercomputer that operates on specialized chips developed in-house. These innovative chips are about the size of a dinner plate and outperform standard chips for artificial intelligence (AI) by 56 times. Each Cerebras chip consolidates the computing power of hundreds of traditional chips.
“Here we show that it is possible to create a very large, specialized supercomputer,” stated Andrew Feldman, the Director General of Cerebras. He emphasized the company’s goal to demonstrate that this work can be completed faster, with less energy consumption, and at a lower price.
The demand for computing power and AI chips has significantly increased with the rapid development of artificial intelligence systems. However, producing AI products often requires substantial computing power and specialized chips, leading to intense competition for such technologies.
This technological race involves major corporations such as Google, Amazon, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel, as well as startups like Cerebras, Graphcore, GroQ, and Sambanova.
Cerebras was established in 2016 with the objective of creating hardware that accelerates AI development. In 2019, the company introduced what they claimed to be the largest computer chip ever created. Mr. Feldman emphasized that their chips can train AI systems 100-1000 times faster than existing equipment.
G42, a company based in Abu Dhabi, has ordered a supercomputer from Cerebras and plans to utilize it for developing and launching AI products in the Middle East. Talal al Cassissi, the General Director of G42, highlighted that the latest generation technology will enable their company to create chat bots and leverage AI in analyzing genomic data and preventive healthcare.
Cerebras has plans to build two more supercomputers for G42 in the coming year – one in Texas and another in North Carolina. They also intend to build six more supercomputers to be distributed globally.