I thought they're more like "wire us our share of METI grant, we'll forward it to TSMC". Besides they wouldn't be going anywhere if that was chasing away 100% of customers.
Another one of these I still sometimes think about is NEC VectorEngine - they had 5 TFLOPS FP32 with 48GB of HBM2 totaling 1.5TB/s bandwidth at $10k in 2020. That was within a digit or two against NVIDIA at basically the same price. But they then didn't capitalize on it, just kept delivering to national institutes in ritualistic manners.
I do have basic conceptual understanding of these grant businesses and have vague intuitions as to how bureaucracy wants substantial capital investments and report files without commercial capitalizations, with emphasis on the last part, as it would disrupt internal politics inside government agencies and also creates unfair government competitive pressure against civilian sectors, but at some point it starts looking like cash campfires. I don't know exactly how slow are M4 Mac Studios relative to NVIDIA Tesla clusters normalized for VRAM, but they're considered comparable regardless just because they run LLMs at 10-20 tok/s. So it's just, unfortunate, that these accelerators of basically same nature as M-series CPUs are built, kept on idle, and then recycled.
The one that is in my mind as "no way these brochure figures are real" is PFN MN-Core - though it looks like they might be doing an LLM specific variant in the future. Hopefully they retail them.
Another one of these I still sometimes think about is NEC VectorEngine - they had 5 TFLOPS FP32 with 48GB of HBM2 totaling 1.5TB/s bandwidth at $10k in 2020. That was within a digit or two against NVIDIA at basically the same price. But they then didn't capitalize on it, just kept delivering to national institutes in ritualistic manners.
I do have basic conceptual understanding of these grant businesses and have vague intuitions as to how bureaucracy wants substantial capital investments and report files without commercial capitalizations, with emphasis on the last part, as it would disrupt internal politics inside government agencies and also creates unfair government competitive pressure against civilian sectors, but at some point it starts looking like cash campfires. I don't know exactly how slow are M4 Mac Studios relative to NVIDIA Tesla clusters normalized for VRAM, but they're considered comparable regardless just because they run LLMs at 10-20 tok/s. So it's just, unfortunate, that these accelerators of basically same nature as M-series CPUs are built, kept on idle, and then recycled.
The one that is in my mind as "no way these brochure figures are real" is PFN MN-Core - though it looks like they might be doing an LLM specific variant in the future. Hopefully they retail them.