@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20231002

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

- AMD's Lisa Su at the Code Conference Discusses Generative AI, MI300, Open Strategy - EUV armed Intel-4 Fab in Ireland Starts Volume Production - AI Impact on Jobs, Case in the Legal Field - Supercomputing Conference coming: SC23, Denver, Nov 12-17 [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HPCNB_20231002.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20231002 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC News Bites, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black. Hi, Shaheen. We'll start with AMD CEO, Lisa Su. She spoke this week at the Code Conference, and she had an interesting interview with

Neelay Patel of The Verge. She covered a lot of ground, including the declaration that AMD's forthcoming high-end GPU, the MI300, will be as fast or faster than the NVIDIA H100, that it targets inferencing more than training. Su said the inference market will be bigger and that in the long run, AMD's open hardware agnostic approach will be better suited to the AI market. She also said, and I quote here, I would call generative AI the killer app for high-performance computing. You need more and more and more, end quote. AI is just another HPC app, as you've heard

me say forever. So broadly speaking, it's the same math, same skill set, same infrastructure, and it'll be even more so in the future. So it was nice to hear. Moving over to Intel, significant news this week that Intel has begun high volume production of its Intel 4, alluding to 4 nanometer class chips. This is their 18 and a half billion dollar plant in Ireland and uses ASML's extreme ultraviolet EUV lithography. It's an impressive leap that helps Intel catch up with TSMC. These ASML machines are 300 million dollar behemoths, the size of an 18 wheeler, that also demand very fine precision. ASML had revenues of over 20 billion euros last year. Pat Gelsinger's foundry strategy for Intel, we're seeing it's unfolding.

Lisa Su, by the way, made reference to the broadening supply chain. For example, the Chips and Science Act in the US. The world is taking action in the face of its over-dependence on TSMC and on Taiwan for the manufacturing of semiconductors, particularly advanced chips that require ASML EUV machines. dependence on TSMC and on Taiwan for the manufacturing of semiconductors, particularly advanced chips that require ASML EUV machines.

Shane, I attended the recent HPC user forum hosted by Hyperion Research, and one of the most interesting sessions came from Arizona State University law professor Gary Marchant talking about the profound changes AI is having on the legal profession, including using large language models to reduce tasks that typically take six hours to 15 minutes and how that's impacting law firms billable time. Also, LLMs will do much of the work that is now done by new hires out of law school. Marchant said, there will likely be, if you can believe this, Shaheen, fewer lawyers. I have a video interview with Gary on the homepage of InsideHPC. Yeah, maybe lawyers are not the best example of how AI will replace humans.

As Professor Marchant said, lawyers who don't use AI will be replaced by lawyers who do. And we can generalize that to all professions. So I think the transition to AI nirvana is the big social issue. Even small disruptions can be a problem if they happen too fast. That's the case for AI, now that it's reached its iPhone moment. For manual work, robots that had sensors are now getting AI and are looking more capable. For works that's already digitized, software bots that had AI are now adding sensors to become multimodal. This includes a segment of the market called robotic process automation that's been around and growing fast for several years.

We should end this episode with a reminder that the annual Supercomputing Conference SC23 is approaching. Denver, November 12th through the 17th. I know we'll both be there and we'll be recording. Yes, I'm getting notices and invitations to special events. For example, the Women in HPC group just announced the date of their annual diversity workshop, which is always a well-attended event. That'll be on Monday, November 13th. And Shaheen, I look forward to your annual Gathering of the Dead

Architecture Society. Yes, indeed. Come see us out there. All right. That's it for this episode. Thanks so much for being with us. HPC News Bites is a production of OrionX in association with Inside HPC. Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on InsideHPC.com and posted on OrionX.net. Thank you for listening.