[40] AI for Big Iron: IBM’s Latest Telum II Processor (Interview)
This year, IBM announced its new Telum II processor, and has started to speak in depth about what’s under the hood. Still eight cores, but using a Samsung 5nm high performance process and increasing the total L2 SRAM from 256 MB to 360 MB, still at an average 19 cycle latency. There’s still an AI accelerator onboard, but the big new features is a built in DPU that shares the internal memory like a core. There’s also an onboard DPU for IO expansion draws, used for GPUs, storage expansion, cryptography, hardware security modules, or the other part of IBM’s new hardware: the IBM Spyre AI Accelerator (that’s the official name, we’ll just call it Spyre).
As part of the launch, I was able to sit down and chat with Dr. Christian Jacobi, IBM Fellow and CTO of Systems Development, who was the lead on Telum I and has spent over 20 years at the company in various forms of hardware design.
Written version: https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/the-future-of-big-iron-telum-ii-and
[00:00] Telum II and Spyre
[02:10] Who is IBM Fellow Christian Jacobi?
[02:50] What is an IBM Fellow?
[03:30] How do you get to be an IBM Fellow?
[04:20] What was the first IBM chip you worked on?
[05:30] What is CTO of Systems Development?
[07:30] How would you describe the Z ethos?
[08:40] What is High-Availability?
[09:10] You’ve gone from chiplets to monolithic?
[11:00] Virtual Cache using L2
[12:10] Core Design for Reliability
[14:50] Performance of Virtual Caches
[16:20] Integrated AI: why?
[18:10] AI Utilization?
[19:50] Was this customer-first or research-first?
[21:10] What sort of models run on Telum?
[23:20] False Positives
[23:50] What is the built-in DPU?
[26:30] Extending AI with DPU
[27:40] IBM Spyre: AIU in New Clothes?
[30:00] What can you do with the larger AI performance?
[31:40] Samsung Foundry for High-Performance
[32:40] AI in chip design?
[34:20] What does chip path-finding look like at IBM?
[35:10] What’s the response to LinuxONE?
[37:00] Take away from the Telum II / Spyre launch?
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