COMPUTING

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13 January 2025 23h13

Despite being the world’s largest computer chip, the WSE-3 achieves 93% silicon utilization—higher than today’s leading GPU. A tiny core, a self-healing fabric, and a clean software abstraction – that’s how you do wafer scale.

WSE Defect Tolerance: 164x Better Silicon Efficiency

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13 January 2025 23h11

One way to measure defect tolerance is to look at the amount of die area. Assuming 0.001 defects per mm^2, GPUs will see 59 defects disabling 361mm^2 of silicon. On the WSE, it sees 46 defects and loses just 2.2mm^2. That's a 164x reduction in dead silicon area!

H100 vs WSE: Wafer-Scale Architecture Comparison at 5nm

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13 January 2025 23h10

Let’s compare at the wafer level. At 5nm, here’s what an H100 sized chip and WSE look like side by side. A 300mm wafer yields ~72 GPUs or one Wafer Scale Engine.

Fault-Tolerant Network Fabric with Redundant Communication Pathways

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13 January 2025 23h09

Our network fabric is also fault tolerant. When a defect is detected, the chip automatically routes around it using redundant communication pathways. The software layer presents the chip as a 2D grid even when there are defects.

WSE Cores: Tiny Chips Enable Efficient Large-Scale Hardware

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13 January 2025 23h09

Before we set out to build a large chip, we first designed a tiny core. Each WSE core is just 0.05mm^2 or ~1% the size of an H100 core. When a defect occurs, we lose a tiny amount of silicon relative to GPUs.

GPU Manufacturing Defects Impact Chip Performance Yields

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13 January 2025 23h08

Modern computer chips are far too large to yield perfect chips economically. When you buy a flagship H100 GPU, a dozen cores are either defective or disabled to manage yield. Since GPU cores are fairly large, too many defects can hurt performance.

Cerebras Solves Wafer-Scale Chip Yield Problem With Defect Tolerance

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13 January 2025 23h07

How does Cerebras yield a wafer-scale chip? Our latest blog provides the answers. https://
cerebras.ai/blog/100x-defe
ct-tolerance-how-cerebras-solved-the-yield-problem
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