#hacker-news
Solving the Yield Problem #
This was a fun read, especially after already having a bit of background knowledge on chip manufacturing. Cerebras and Groq both utilize custom chips to power their ridiculously fast AI inference, but I hadn’t previously considered the widely differing order of magnitudes these chips have compared to traditional GPUs. As an example, Cerebras cites their WSE-3 as having 900,000 cores compared to individual H100s which have only 144.
Cerebras’ method for reducing the impact of defects feels quite straightforward—reducing core sizes and having a surplus of cores means that individual core defects are able to be had at an extremely small scale while having almost no impact on the overall chip. Additionally, Cerebras uses a special routing architecture to ensure that cores are able to route around disabled cores, meaning that disabling cores creates no interference. Through these methods, Cerebras notes the WSE-3 as having a high 93% core utilization, compared to H100s with a 92% utilization.
# 2025-01-15 - #chips, #hacker-newsDoomPDF #
The highly anticipated sequel to PDFTris. It’s surprisingly responsive for how limiting PDFs are, but it makes sense given that most of the logic is just JavaScript.
# 2025-01-13 - #hacker-newsPDFtris #
Cool demo of the concerning program execution that is built into PDFs. I initially assumed that PostScript was used to add logic, but it apparently instead uses JavaScript, which I didn’t know was able to be embedded into PDFs. Note that it doesn’t seem to work in Preview.app, but it does work in the builtin PDF viewers in Chrome and Firefox.
# 2025-01-09 - #hacker-news