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epistasisyesterday at 6:47 PM1 replyview on HN

It's so funny to see FP4.... I remember 20 years ago being asked what sort of HPC we needed in genomics, and the answer was basically, "lower precision, faster" for the stuff I was working on. But FP4 is, well, almost comical.

One thing not on that comparison table: die size. If I'm understanding that correctly, it's about the same as the Rubin, but at 1/3 the number of NVFP4 PFLOPs. (The text disagrees with the table, I'm taking the table as truth, perhaps that's wrong...)


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nxtfariyesterday at 6:56 PM

Agree, I remember when even half precision made its way into C# sometime around 2020 (I didn’t know much about ML then) and I thought, well I guess that’s a worthwhile tradeoff but I can’t imagine going lower. Lo and behold (1-bit Bonsai) how much lower you could go.

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