The Godzillas of silicon chips: Extremely powerful advanced chips in the market
Date: 30/10/2023
Semiconductor experts predict an average one trillion transistors in a chip by 2030. That's clearly the growth curve following the famous Moore's Law. Let's look at some of the chips now in the market with highly dense number of transistors.
1. Cerebras AI chip WSE-2
Cerebras Systems made AI chip WSE-2 with 2.6 trillion transistors is world's largest integrated circuit chip for complex artificial intelligence (AI) computation applications training with very large AI databases as a single data core.
Cerebras Systems made this big chip by having multiple semiconductor wafers integrated using advanced semiconductor packaging and system design. WSE-2 packs 2.6 trillion transistors and 40 gigabytes of on-chip memory with an active area of 46,225 mm2 fabricated on 300mm silicon wafers using TSMC's 7nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. WSE-2 are deployed in stand-alone units of the company’s CS-2 Artificial Intelligence system and incorporated as accelerators in large-scale AI computing centers.
This chip is really a Giant compared to the rest below.
2. Apple M2 Ultra
The M2 Ultra from Apple packs 134 billion transistors with around 60 processor cores and is made using TSMC 5 nm technology node.
Image Source: Apple
M2 Ultra is the latest high peformance chip by Apple powering the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro desktops.
M2 Ultra features unified memory architecture to handle breakthrough 192GB of memory capacity and support 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra has powerful CPU and large GPU. 32-core Neural Engine inside M2 Ultra handles 31.6 trillion operations per second.
M2 Ultra packs two M2 Max dies connected using Apple's UltraFusion packaging technology, which uses a silicon interposer to connect silicon dies with more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth.
The media engine inside M2 Ultra has dedicated, hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, and ProRes encode and decode, allowing M2 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.
M2 Ultra integrate a display engine driving up to six Pro Display XDRs of 100 million pixels.
It also featues Secure Enclave and a hardware-verified secure boot and runtime anti-exploitation technologies to make the device secure.
3. AMD Instinct MI300X
Another chip beast in the market is AMD Instinct MI300X accelerator, the advanced accelerator for generative AI.
It has 13 chiplets stacked in 3D, 24 Zen CPU cores, graphic engine, and 8 stacks of HBM3 with total transistor count of 146 billion. It is the largest AMD chip in production. MI300 is 8x improvement in AI performance and 5x in performance per watt compared to its earlier Instinct MI250.
Image Source: AMD
4. Intel Data Center GPU Max 1550
Intel Data Center GPU Max 1550 which was formerly called as Ponte Vecchio packing 100 billion transistors is Intel’s highest density processor. It has 47 chiplets/tiles with up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of high bandwidth memory. Ponte Vecchiio which is called Intel GPU Max Series features 408MB of L2 cache and 64MB of L1 cache to increase throughput and performance. The Intel Data Center Max Series GPU, code-named Rialto Bridge successor to the Max Series GPU and is intended to arrive in 2024.
Image Source: Intel
5. NVIDIA H100 and A100
NVIDIA H100 and A100: Nvidia A100 has 54 billion transistors with silicon die size of 826 mm square and can execute 5 petaflops of performance. It has tensor cores and has up to 128 streaming multiprocessor (SMs) and 8192 FP32 CUDA cores.
NVIDIA H100 packs 80 Billion Transistors and has up to 144 streaming multiprocessors. Each SM is composed of up to 128 FP32 units which should give us a total of 18,432 CUDA cores. Other specs include:
Image Source: nVidia
Image Source:nVidia
These chips feature 4 Fourth-generation Tensor Cores per SM, 528 per GPU 80 GB HBM3, 5 HBM3 stacks, 10 512-bit Memory Controllers and 50 MB L2 Cache.
6. Snapdragon X Elite
The most latest Snapdragon X Elite by Qualcomm is a new 4.3 GHz, 12-core, 64-bit Arm processor is 2X better in performance compared to Intel's Core i9-13980HX of x86 Architecture and some of the Apple's PC and notebook processors such as Apple M2.
Image Source: Qualcomm
7. Intel Core i9K
Though hesitantly listed this processor in this article. It's the most latest desktop processor by Intel with 24 cores and 32 threads. It can work upto a frquency up to 6GHz.
Image Source: Intel
