It's unfortunate that they don't sell them on open markets. There are few of these accelerators that could threaten NVIDIA monopoly if prices(and manufacturing costs!) were right.
I've come to wonder if this just because the culture of Japan itself has been so "crabby".
It's just too inward looking these days - probably why technical innovations in Japan don't get shaped to meet the worlds needs, but gets sold as if it were a luxury artisan-product (ala "swiss-made" stuff).
The trouble with people who criticize Japan (incl. Japanese) is that they think this is because of "old people & culture" - but actually, no, the "old" Japanese (in the 1900s-1980s) seemed to have been extraordinarily curious about the world, and also very clever in marketing things. The issue is most definitely "modern", but ofc. saying that is verboten in the dogma of liberalism.
You might be onto something. Anecdotally, I just came across some armchair economist lamenting lack of aptitude among Japanese startups for foreign currency acquisition, and I could only agree - I can't recall many Japanese startups or corporate business expansions primarily focusing on foreign sales. The mental model is always to get rich quick within Japan and/or South Asia and retire. "The world" outside is treated like tiny separate bonus rooms.
Thinking about Japanese economy in general and how it hadn't grown in 30-40 years: 40 years is technically two generations, but life in Japan hadn't deteriorated meaningfully during that period. Substantial socio-political improvements were made, university entrance had rose somewhat absurdly high, some new infrastructures were built, convenience store sandwich prices hasn't doubled, overtimes and harassments at workplaces are way more strictly scrutinized. There's the problem of employment ice age, but it's not as bad as the collapse of the Soviet Union; not at "Vladimir Putin was laid off KGB and drove taxi to make ends meet" levels, only "PhDs drove trucks". So "Japan still using FAX" narratives only partially make sense. Overall, it does feel that there is something strange is going on in this country, something like effective isolationism.
I guess my point is... it's unfortunate that these efforts and costs spent goes to waste, and we don't know why it's only built to be recycled.
> The trouble with people who criticize Japan (incl. Japanese) is that they think this is because of "old people & culture" - but actually, no, the "old" Japanese (in the 1900s-1980s) seemed to have been extraordinarily curious about the world, and also very clever in marketing things. The issue is most definitely "modern", but ofc. saying that is verboten in the dogma of liberalism.
I have been living in Japan for the past 7 years, and in my experience all generations are guilty.
I work for a big international research project, so I have met many old Japanese professors and high-level researchers. They all lament how their generation wanted to go abroad, see the world, and change things, whereas their new graduates don't even want to learn English, just stay in their little Japanese bubble and do what they are told to do. But for every one of those outgoing old Japanese people, you meet 10 who are dead set in their ways and don't want any change, and with the population getting older, the country has become stagnant.
Great article documenting PEZY. It's incredible how close they are from NVidia despite being a very small team.
To me, this looks like a win.
Governments are there to finance projects like this that enable the country to have certain skillsets that wouldn't exist otherwise because of other countries having better solutions in the global market.
Pezy and the other Japanese native chips are first and foremost about HPC. The world may have picked up AI in the last 2 years, but the Japanese chipmakers are still thinking primarily about HPC, with AI as just one HPC workload.
These Pezy chips are also made for large clusters. There is a whole system design around the chips that wasn't presented here. The Pezy-SC2, for instance, was built around liquid immersion cooling. I am not sure you could ever buy an air-cooled version.
It may also be worth noting that Japan has a pretty long history of marching to their own drummer in computing. They either created their own architectures or adopted others after pretty much everyone had moved on.
When you're building your own CPUs, why be beholden to US companies for GPUs? This makes perfect sense.
GPUs are great if your workload can use them, but not so great for more general tasks. These are more appropriate to more traditional supercomputing tasks, as in they're not optimized for lower precision AI stuff, like NVIDIA GPUs are.
Because the LLM craze has rendered last-gen Tensor accelerators from NVIDIA (& others) useless for all those FP64 HPC workloads. From the article:
> The Hopper H200 is 47.9 gigaflops per watt at FP64 (33.5 teraflops divided by 700 watts), and the Blackwell B200 is rated at 33.3 gigaflops per watt (40 teraflops divided by 1,200 watts). The Blackwell B300 has FP64 severely deprecated at 1.25 teraflops and burns 1,400 watts, which is 0.89 gigaflops per watt. (The B300 is really aimed at low precision AI inference.)
I wonder how much progress (if any) is being done on floating point formats other than IEEE floats; on serious adoption in hardware in particular. Stuff like posits [1] for instance look very promising.
Something doesn't add up here. The listed peak fp64 performance assumes one fp64 operation per clock per thread, yet there's very little description of how each PE performs 8 flops per cycle, only "threads are paired up such that one can take over processing when another one stalls...", classic latency-hiding. So the performance figures must assume that each PE has either an 8-wide SIMD unit (and 16-wide for fp32) or 8 separately schedulable execution units, neither of which seem likely given the supposed simplicity of the core (or 4 FMA EUs). Am I missing something?
Interesting that they’re investing in standard _AI_ toolchains, rather than standard HPC toolchains, even though I imagine Japanese supercomputing has more demand for the latter.
Adding to what everyone else has said, Japan is known to be a threshold nuclear state (from a weapons perspective). They explicitly stay around just weeks away from being able to perform a nuclear weapons test, and they are commonly referred to being "a screwdriver's turn" away from having a nuclear weapon.
They have massive government investment in not only maintaining that status, but also doing so on a completely domestic supply chain as much as possible.
Therefore they have the same need for supercomputers that the US national labs do (perhaps more so, since they're even more reliant on simulation), and heavily prefer locally sourced pieces of that critical infrastructure.
I wouldn't be surprised if an incredibly large part of the local push for Rapidus is to pull them off of TSMC and the supply chain risk for their nuclear program in case the whole China/Taiwan thing comes to a head.
21 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadIt's just too inward looking these days - probably why technical innovations in Japan don't get shaped to meet the worlds needs, but gets sold as if it were a luxury artisan-product (ala "swiss-made" stuff).
The trouble with people who criticize Japan (incl. Japanese) is that they think this is because of "old people & culture" - but actually, no, the "old" Japanese (in the 1900s-1980s) seemed to have been extraordinarily curious about the world, and also very clever in marketing things. The issue is most definitely "modern", but ofc. saying that is verboten in the dogma of liberalism.
Thinking about Japanese economy in general and how it hadn't grown in 30-40 years: 40 years is technically two generations, but life in Japan hadn't deteriorated meaningfully during that period. Substantial socio-political improvements were made, university entrance had rose somewhat absurdly high, some new infrastructures were built, convenience store sandwich prices hasn't doubled, overtimes and harassments at workplaces are way more strictly scrutinized. There's the problem of employment ice age, but it's not as bad as the collapse of the Soviet Union; not at "Vladimir Putin was laid off KGB and drove taxi to make ends meet" levels, only "PhDs drove trucks". So "Japan still using FAX" narratives only partially make sense. Overall, it does feel that there is something strange is going on in this country, something like effective isolationism.
I guess my point is... it's unfortunate that these efforts and costs spent goes to waste, and we don't know why it's only built to be recycled.
I have been living in Japan for the past 7 years, and in my experience all generations are guilty.
I work for a big international research project, so I have met many old Japanese professors and high-level researchers. They all lament how their generation wanted to go abroad, see the world, and change things, whereas their new graduates don't even want to learn English, just stay in their little Japanese bubble and do what they are told to do. But for every one of those outgoing old Japanese people, you meet 10 who are dead set in their ways and don't want any change, and with the population getting older, the country has become stagnant.
To me, this looks like a win.
Governments are there to finance projects like this that enable the country to have certain skillsets that wouldn't exist otherwise because of other countries having better solutions in the global market.
These Pezy chips are also made for large clusters. There is a whole system design around the chips that wasn't presented here. The Pezy-SC2, for instance, was built around liquid immersion cooling. I am not sure you could ever buy an air-cooled version.
GPUs are great if your workload can use them, but not so great for more general tasks. These are more appropriate to more traditional supercomputing tasks, as in they're not optimized for lower precision AI stuff, like NVIDIA GPUs are.
> The Hopper H200 is 47.9 gigaflops per watt at FP64 (33.5 teraflops divided by 700 watts), and the Blackwell B200 is rated at 33.3 gigaflops per watt (40 teraflops divided by 1,200 watts). The Blackwell B300 has FP64 severely deprecated at 1.25 teraflops and burns 1,400 watts, which is 0.89 gigaflops per watt. (The B300 is really aimed at low precision AI inference.)
[1] https://posithub.org/docs/posit_standard-2.pdf
[1] https://youtu.be/vzVlQhaAZtQ?si=DJRmwOoyYGdq6mUQ [2] https://calligotech.com/uttunga/
They have massive government investment in not only maintaining that status, but also doing so on a completely domestic supply chain as much as possible.
Therefore they have the same need for supercomputers that the US national labs do (perhaps more so, since they're even more reliant on simulation), and heavily prefer locally sourced pieces of that critical infrastructure.
I wouldn't be surprised if an incredibly large part of the local push for Rapidus is to pull them off of TSMC and the supply chain risk for their nuclear program in case the whole China/Taiwan thing comes to a head.