ChatGPT just announced they need an absurd amount of video cards. Why are video cards used and not dedicated CPUs? Why not make a motherboard that has the right processors?
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> Why not make a motherboard that has the right processors?
I don’t think any of the other comments have answered this bit.
We _can_ make very specific processors for machine learning that are much faster than GPUs. Potentially orders of magnitudes faster. These are called ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits).
However, there are big downsides to this:
* People: Doing this requires a big team of experience engineers.
* Time: Making these products from scratch will take at least a year or two for the first generation.
* Cost: Manufacturing custom silicon is _ridiculously_ expensive, especially at a smaller scale.
* Flexibility: The faster a computer chip is at doing one task, the slower it will be at anything other than that task (if it can do it at all). This means you can’t improve an algorithm once it is made into hardware, you need a whole new chip.
All these factors mean that doing custom silicon just isn’t viable for most people*. A GPU offers a lot of performance, but is also very cheap for what it is. So it’s the best option in many cases.
*There are exceptions, it’s an increasing trend for finance companies to produce small batches of custom chips for their high frequency trading. They’re in a very unique situation though.
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